


If NASA Ever Needs Someone to Keep an Arrow Inside a Moving Rectangle

by easyforpauline



Series: an early name used for videophones [9]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Book Club, Crying, Dirty Talk, Dom/sub, Domestic Fluff, Face Slapping, Figging, Gags, Hand Feeding, Hand Jobs, Humiliation, Looney Tunes Roleplay (in Spirit), M/M, Marriage Negotiation, Name-Calling, Picnics, Some Canon-Typical Angst, Spanking, Stone Top, arts and crafts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-28 23:56:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20434619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/easyforpauline/pseuds/easyforpauline
Summary: "You're all talk," Bucky says, but he saunters off anyway, because he's a good friend and husband and because there really is a disgusting amount of sweat coming out of Steve's post-run body, so much so he should probably call a Hazmat team, but a shower post-haste will do. He gets his fuck-wrecked shirt, with its black and white pattern of bunnies, and pulls the retractable hook down out of the bathroom ceiling as Steve strips and climbs in the shower, disappearing behind dark blue like a hole beneath a picnic blanket. The one time in their relationship that Steve is the hole.(If you don't count his seemingly endless capacity to take Bucky's pain and sorrow and bury it inside himself, keeping it safe and warm and shared. And who counts sappy shit like that? No one in this household, thank you.)





	If NASA Ever Needs Someone to Keep an Arrow Inside a Moving Rectangle

**Author's Note:**

> Explanation of the angst tag in endnotes.

"There," Bucky says, and Steve startles a little, back of his head thunking into Bucky's left shoulder. Bucky kisses the sore spot. "That's where I want to get married."

Recovered from the sudden break in the quiet, Steve lowers the book that Bucky's been reading over his shoulder. The two of them are depressing bastards learning about modern mass extinction of living creatures together. His arm, slung behind him and over Bucky's body to keep Bucky secure where he's balanced stretched out on the couch's back, tightens its hold. A loving, boa constrictor kinda squeeze.

"A little Mediterranean island? Little conventional," he teases. "What happened to our church fulla toxins?"

Bucky huffs, and reads aloud, "'At the end of the bridge there's a booth where ten euros buys a ticket that allows you to climb—or better yet, take the elevator—'"

"We'd climb."

"I know, sweetheart. Shush. '—up to the massive castle that gives the island its name. The castle houses _a display of medieval torture instruments_—italics all mine, Steven—as well as a fancy hotel and an outdoor cafe. On a summer evening, the cafe is supposed to be a pleasant place to sip Campari and contemplate the terrors of the past.' Asshole, obviously I want to marry you in front of the medieval torture instruments. And then I want to go outside and sip Campari. And I _want _to snorkel and look at stuff that might die soon."

"That's what you want, huh?"

"Obviously. And then you take me back to our 'fancy' hotel and show me _your _medieval torture instruments."

"Which means?"

"Use your imagination, numbskull. I'm not the master tactician sadist in this room."

Steve pinches him hard on the back of his neck.

"_Ow_." 

"You aren't nice to me, I'll really put the 'ow' in 'vows.'"

The puff of breath on Steve's neck from Bucky's laugh makes Steve wriggle, or as close to wriggling as he ever really gets, a twitch of his head and rippling of the muscles in his back, easily seen through his too-small tee-shirt.

Bucky says, "You promise?"

"Nah. I'll put the 'ow' in 'vows' if you're nice to me too. Promise." And then he goes and ruins it. "Who are we inviting to the medieval torture wedding?"

"Um."

There's a moment where Steve doesn't understand that he ruined it, and then a moment where he does understand. As evidenced by the second, harder pinch to his neck, a distraction, a gift. Bucky closes his eyes, trying to stay inside that electric spark sensation like it'sthe medieval torture castle's fancy hotel, relishing the throb between his legs that matches the throb where Steve's fingers press.

Earlier, Steve massaged IcyHot into his neck for him, his shoulders, down his spine, and he fucked up and kissed the balmed spine like some kinda sap and then his lips stung and he whined about it like a big baby. But a problem-solver to the end, he flipped Bucky over and kissed the balm onto _his _lips and bit them when the sting began to fade, effectively telling it, "Wake up! Daylight's wasting!" The sting woke as immediately as Bucky always _doesn't_ when Steve orders him to, because his brain stays sleep-mushy with _happy, safe, Steve_.

Now he's got a blank, painless canvas of a neck, ready for whatever little hurts happy, safe Steve wants to dish out.

"Never mind that," says Mr. Problem-Solver, Man With a Plan. "We'll figure it out later."

"Yeah."

"You wanna keep reading?"

"I do. Might fall asleep, though. I don't mind, you keep going if I do."

"I mind. Book club means book club. We read together or not at all."

"So noble. Okay. Chop chop, let's learn." Karate chop karate chop, goes the hand on his neck, gently, mime-like, and he can't quite stifle his giggle.

Nightmare-sweat dampening a magically appearing memory foam pillow, a light sheet twisted around his chest and one leg, Bucky wakes to the noise of Steve cleaning out the icebox. Banging and cursing. That undercurrent of electric buzz and escaping cool air. Bucky's racing heart cools its jets in response. The book's on the floor, and when he picks it up, he's pleased to see Steve used a bookmark instead of dog-earing, easing a postcard from the Met gift shop gently between the pages same as he must have eased Bucky down onto the couch cushions. The last words he remembers—_construct the towering structures that become reefs_—sit just north of centered on the marked page.

Without turning, the cursing, clanging Steve crouched in front of the icebox says, "We had _three _meatball heroes stashed in the back of this thing?" He's gotten better at detecting Bucky's near-silent footsteps.

"You gonna eat them, trash compactor?" _That _makes him turn around. The three heroes are cradled in his arms like baby Jesus in the arms of someone who just lost his faith and is real pissed about it. "What? You can survive me shooting you in the stomach, you can survive a little rotting meat and dairy."

"Hilarious. I found your missing jar of pickles."

"Ooh, gimme."

"Say please, fuckpoodle."

Bucky rolls his eyes. "Please, oh my benevolent majesty, may I feast on my prodigal baby dills?"

"Hmm." Steve tosses the cradled heroes in the trash can pulled up to his right, and takes the pickles from the icebox, examining them with an exaggeratedly furrowed brow. "I don't know. I _did _just wipe down the floors. _Yet_,you're not showing me appreciation by getting on your knees."

The floors are spotless and no longersticky with the aftermath of exploded soda; no pasta sauce barnacles to the stovetop, and the counters and sinks gleam. Everything smells like rosemary. He forces himself not to check the microwave clock. Instead, he cuts his own marionette strings and drops to his knees. _Hands _and knees, and looks at Steve with wide eyes he hopes are reminiscent of a begging poodle's. In his best sad Oliver Twist voice, he asks, "Please, sir, may I have some pickles?"

Steve laughs like choking. He slides the pickles across the floor to where Bucky's Twisting and poodling. "We're outta carrots. Eggs too."

"Guess giant frittatas every breakfast'll do that to you. Farmer's market's tomorrow, you know."

"Perfect," he says, and then, "Hmm." He snatches the pickles back before Bucky can get all the way off his hands and knees to open them.

"Hey!"

"Hey, your damn self. I'm helping." The safety seal's pop always sounds like a smiley face. "Here you go, angelface," Steve simpers. "I know that would've been too hard for your weak little arms."

Voice full of smiley safety-seal pop: "Gee, thanks, mister!" He kneels up and pops a pickle in his mouth. It's sour heaven. "You want any help?"

"Nah. And don't talk with your mouth full."

"Hypocrite. Talk with your mouth full of mashed potatoes. Talk with your mouth full of gummy bears. Talk with your mouth full of cock or ass, especially, and yet—"

Steve cuts him off with an unconvincingly unamused eyebrow. "You know what? Yeah, help me." He tugs Bucky closer by the elbow, prompting him to knee-walk until he's next to the trash can, then moves it to Bucky's lap. "Hold that." Bucky wrinkles his nose at the rotting food smell and Steve wrinkles his forehead to match. "Too much?"

"Nah. I can handle it."

"Thanks. Just for five minutes, and then how about I smack you and then you're good?"

"I'm never good, stupid."

"You're already being disciplined for talking back." His tone's light, infuriating. "Don't make it worse." He tosses a couple slimy brown leaves that must have escaped from the spinach bag, wily bastards.

Bucky tries to chew his pickle obnoxiously enough to communicate what he thinks of the concept of _not _making it worse. Based on the cheerful _hi-ho-hi-ho _Snow White and the Seven Dwarves whistling he's met with, that message doesn't come across loud or clear.

It's not too hard to earn a little extra smacking; all it takes, all it ever takes, is kiss after kiss to Steve's palms.

  


-

  


Finding peace and seclusion on the beach is easier now that the sun's setting earlier, the tide frigid enough that they both regret the choice to take off their socks and shoes and wade. A damn sight easier than it ever is to get some space alone in the park the same day as the farmer's market. 

Not a complaint; sometimes they don't need peace. The world's good enough, so long as it doesn't sprout anyone fancying themself an amateur P.I.-cum-paparazzo. And it hasn't in a while. If they get to be anonymous, meaningless, sitting on a bench or against the base of a massive tree dropping its leaves on their heads, ankles hooked together, passing an apple back and forth, an open-top carton of blackberries threatening to spill from its perch across both their laps, then it's lovely, the absence of peace. Voices and barking and traffic and dribbling basketballs, skidding skateboard wheels before someone takes a spill, the temporary thud of a body, all flaring up together, all thrillingly mundane. 

But this is nice too, a kind of living too. Cold sea breeze and quiet crashing. No one else but the occasional stray gull, now that they've wandered long enough that their first footprints in the steak-fat-smooth sand will have been washed away.

A picnic basket swings from Steve's hand, comically too big for the amount of fruit, cling-wrapped sandwiches, and few other essentials they packed. Their Sexy Chopped picnic basket, repurposed, reminding Bucky with every swing that it's about time they use it for its intended purpose again. His drawer of flotsam and jetsam he wants Steve to use is nearly all the way full, and _so _many things can be done with a stack of paper party hats.

"Worth the train ride?" he asks, and that grunt is a clear-cut _yes_, even if Steve was fidgety and impatient after the first hour. Fingers drumming hard on his own thigh, Bucky's thigh, the pole to his left. Putting his book down every few minutes to laze his head back and wipe a hand down his face. His one attempt to open the basket and fish out something to eat was met with Bucky frowning and saying, fake-wounded, "You don't want to eat on the beach with me?"

Steve shot him an, _Are you serious? _sort of look, but closed the basket's flaps. When the car finally emptied out because clearly everyone else had checked the weather forecast and had an ounce of self-protective instinct, Steve pinched Bucky's hip, a vicious wrist-slap for successfully guilting him. So Bucky smiled and dug a conciliatory Clif bar out of the inner pocket of his jacket. It had lived a long, hard life and looked like decomposing roadkill, but Bucky's handsome trash compactor inhaled the peanut buttery shit regardless. Then he got up and began pacing, and Bucky put his own book down on his thigh and sprawled out, arms across the seatbacks, to watch fondly.

"Sky's pretty," Steve says, squinting. Bucky taps the sunglasses on top of Steve's head so they fall down to cover his eyes.

"You're pretty."

Steve shoves him. His heart's not in it, or is in it, depending how you think about it. Point is, Bucky hardly budges, not drifting any closer to the frigid, lapping waves. "So's your fucking face."

Bucky shoves him back, heart all the way in it, meaning Steve hardly budges either, just smiles as blinding as the sun above the beach would have been a couple weeks and few hours ago.

Bucky says to that smile, "Shouldn't have waited for the crowds to clear off the train, y'know."

"Waited for what? To stop cruelly starving me to death?"

"_You. _You shouldn't've waited, to do your whole—" He gyrates and waves his fists over his head. "You know. How much you think we could get, we put down a hat while the _erstwhile Captain America _does pull-ups on the poles?"

"No one should pay me for blowing off steam."

"Thought that's what the SSR and SHIELD was all about. Maybe we'd even make enough we could pay to replace 'em when you inevitably break the whole train car yanking on it like that."

Steve's eyes and ridiculous eyebrows say he's unimpressed, but the tongue poked into his cheek says that he's well aware Bucky's an insightful comedic genius, and that it's a Herculean struggle not to laugh. "Hit yourself in the face for me, would ya, pal?"

"You have two hands." But he obliges anyway, right hand so Steve won't fuss. Unseasonable warmth blooms on his cheek, sun from behind clouds, and the crack of skin on skin sounds beautiful as always, but he kind of feels like it should have sounded different, them being where they are. Through the magic of proximity, that slap should have sounded like a wave crashing against rocks.

But warmth. But it makes Steve laugh, and what could be better? It makes Steve call him a, "No worse than mediocre boy." Not better, but second best.

Bucky says, "Thank you." Quick clarification: "For hitting me."

Now Steve chooses to acknowledge that he does in fact have two hands, drawing Bucky close with an arm around his waist, tucking his face into Bucky's neck a moment to breathe in, out, hot. He presses a kiss there. Before pulling away, he murmurs, "Think we found a good spot yet?"

"Mmm. This isn't good enough, we'll probably decide nothing's good enough and be walking around for hours."

"Well, we've got high standards."

"We absolutely do not."

"Learn to speak for yourself, Buck. It's a worthwhile skill."

"Nah. I'm thinking of going in the other direction—All the way to ventriloquy."

"Hm," Steve says, and Bucky sinks into the expectant pause, Steve's big fingers coming up to hold his jaw, squish his cheeks in. "You do look like a dummy."

Turns out Bucky does gotta work on speaking for himself, 'cause he's got nothing to say to that. Smiling drills an ache into the spot Steve's thumb grips, and he feels flesh on the other side ooze out between Steve's fingers with the force of how stupid-happy he is. Good. Good to look even more like a dummy, willing those words into an encore.

Steve smacks a kiss onto the tip of his nose, and when he finally releases Bucky—at the waist and jaw both—so he can get to work spreading out the picnic blanket, the deep-drilled jaw ache remains like lipstick on a shirt collar. "Fuck you," he says through his laugh when Steve pulls him out of wading in that feeling by softly thwapping him in the face with the blanket and a, "Hand here, lazybones?"

Bucky offers his hand to Steve and Steve low-fives it. "Don't take me literally," he says, and puts a corner of the blanket in the proffered hand, manually folding Bucky's fingers into a tight grip on the fabric.

Bucky says, "Yeah, okay," and follows through. Lazy his bones may be, but deep in their marrow, he does love teamwork.

Ass and elbows on the finally flattened blanket, he wrenches his eyes away from the violent ballet of waves folding themselves into one another, rising and falling and slipping beneath, the same blue-grey as his bedroom walls. He clears his throat, looks meaningfully at Steve, and says, "But really, come on, we might make even more than just enough to fix _that _car." Steve groans. "That one car? Chump change. We should be dreaming bigger. We could make enough to renovate the whole damn MTA."

"They're already ruining lives by renovating the damn MTA. Don't encourage them."

"Just saying, they're gonna do it anyway, we might as well fork over the cash. Then they can spend _that _budget on somethin' else."

"Like what?" And then Steve's saying, "No. Nope. Don't—" before he's heard the answer, mostly thanks to how Bucky's grinning like a shark that's just finished a picnic of its own.

"Paying you to blow off steam."

Steve throws a peach at his head. Bucky's left arm shoots up to catch it. "Hey! That could have bruised."

"You're fine. It's soft."

"Exactly. The fucking peach coulda bruised, wiseass. You know what, I change my mind. The city should spend their new money on forming a task force to investigate the _erstwhile _Captain America's many abuses against produce."

"Sorry, dear," Steve says to the peach, and Bucky, in a high-pitched hopefully peach-ish voice, replies, "You're not forgiven."

"Good luck getting into ventriloquy school with that audition."

"Thank you," Bucky says primly. The first bite of peach is a satisfying wet crunch, messing his face. Before long, he's practically python-ed the thing down his gullet, eager for a sweet weight in his stomach. As he ducks past Steve to grab another from the basket, Steve ruffles his hair.

Bucky smiles a little and ruffles his hair right back. His manicured thumbnail leaves a moon in the new peach's flesh, and he has to ask, "Why do people use the peach emoji for ass when they're not talking about, you know, uh, 'kinky' shit?"

"What?" Steve's eyes have gone crinkly. He imitates Bucky's bunny ear quote marks with a dopey, mocking look on his face just made for ignoring.

"I'm just sayin', what do these look more like—" He pulls down his jogging pants enough to show the pale top of his ass— "this thing right now, or this thing after you say, uh, take that belt of yours off, mister?"

Steve snorts. "Are _you_ fishing for a compliment? Who says this thing—" Insert a good grope of Bucky's ass here— "looks like a peach either way?"

Bucky shoves at him, laughing. "You know what I mean."

"Nah, I'm just kidding." An arm around his shoulders and a smile against his neck. "I took my belt off right now, _mister_, I could make your ass look exactly like this." A big chomp of his own peach sends juice rolling down his chin, and his voice grows thick with bright sugar. "Bites and all."

"So there we go. Shame and disrespect to waste the majesty of a good ripe peach—y'know, like a _sunset, _jeeze—on talking in code about some basic, unmarked skin."

"You're ridiculous. You know that?"

"Oh, sure. Just me who's ridiculous here. But how much you bet the internet would pay for the famous Bucky Barnes' 'thinkpiece' on 'sexting' 'emojis." His hands are batted out of the air by a grinning Steve.

"Cut out the bunny ears, dumbass. I can already hear it in your voice just fine."

"Come on. Could auction it off to the highest bidding site."

"Yeah, I don't think we're that hard-up for cash yet, pal. But I'd love to read it. If you want."

"Fine. I'll post it on our fucking company intranet."

Today's list for the market, folded up small in his zipping pocket, bears the same curlicue S with a small JB tucked into the lower curve, brass as Steve's balls, that adorns each page on their intranet. Behind the letters spreads a web of skinny cobalt lines carefully traced from the Brooklyn portion of a subway map. Yes, he maybe had too much fun putting this all together. Or he'd say so if he, unlike Steve, believed there were such a thing as too much fun.

He _does_ draw the line at using the fountain pen and inkwell and blotter set-up Steve has specifically for love letters. His gratitude for the fact that that's not a line Steve draws is more massive than a dozen rhinos stacked on top of each other.

Mostly, Steve's mailbox at the community center receives nothing but junk mail. When Steve first mentioned that, Bucky winked and said, "I can send you some _junk _of my own," to cover for how unreasonably sad the information had made him, and now he's thinking he should make good on his promise by drawing out a row of eggplant emojis on their good ivory card stock letterhead. Maybe wreathe those implied phalluses with some peach emojis colored as they should be, bright bluish-red cut through with thin streaks of something sallow, only present enough to imply a previous underlying color, and darkening to definite future-bruisedness toward the bottom curve.

A fruit to get anyone's gears going, if they've got good taste at all.

But it doesn't hurt to check. "Do you still want junk mail?"

"Do ah vuh?" Flecks of partially masticated egg salad fly onto the surrounding sand. 

Bucky clears his throat. "That timing was my fault. I acknowledge that I self-sabotaged and I'd like to formally apologize to myself."

Steve flips him off, but swallows before speaking again. "What did I ever say to make you think I want junk mail? I don't exactly invite it."

"I'm telling you a double entendre."

"Oh. Oh!" Steve's whole face lights up, scrunches up, and smooths out in the space of a couple blinks. "That's a no on sexting me at work. But thanks."

"Okay. Then, um. Can I decorate it?"

"'It?' The fuck is 'it,' buddy? I'm the one in charge of decorating your ass. Thought that was your whole point there."

"No, I mean—"

"Already decorated your ears. You want another makeup job, I'm more than happy—"

"Holy shit, I try to offer you something nice—"

"Is there vajazzling for dicks and assholes now? No need to get my permission if that's what—"

"Your _mailbox_, asshole. Can I decorate your fucking mailbox?"

"And it's 'may' you, by the way," but there's no bite in his voice. His voice is a soft peach still whole, cradled in one of their palms, vulnerable and streaky. He's actually taken aback. "My mailbox? Mine?"

"Yeah. At your office."

"It's not really _my_ office."

"I know, I know. Jeeze. _The _office. Everyone's big happy communist kumbaya office." The jibe doesn't earn him so much as a teasing slap. If it had, if Steve's voice and hands hadn't both gone so soft and unsure, Bucky would maybe feel stupid right now, painfully shy about the request. That wouldn't be _bad_; he'd just need to let Steve firmly coddle and coax him to the finish line of his thought.

As it is, he forges ahead confidently while Steve gets himself together, or as close to together as he cares about getting himself. "May I, dear husband mine, make you a special name label and, I dunno, put some holographic stickers on the box too? Is that, you know, allowed? Institutionally or—"

"Okay." He takes another big bite of sandwich. 

"Yeah?"

"Yesh." Either his eyes are watery or they've turned so pale they're silvery mirrors reflecting the ocean at Bucky's back. He uncrosses his legs to place an ankle over Bucky's, bare from how they both rolled up their pants to wade uncomfortably far. The curly hair there's nearly invisible, but it rasps against Bucky's darker-haired ankle, against the smooth strip of skin beneath the knob of bone. A secret just for him. Steve swallows, suddenly polite, repeating, "Yeah, yeah of course you can, Buck," in a voice soft as the picnic blanket. And they tossed a whole capful of fabric softener in with the blanket and their socks and underwear last night, so. Well.

Bucky feels himself blush. "Geeze. You're acting like I just proposed."

"You didn't?" Steve's face goes pinched. "Is that not...I haven't read up on the particulars of how it works for us inverts to get married in these godless days. I thought there was some sort of postal labeling traditionally involved."

"I hate you."

"You _don't _want to marry me? On the—Mediterranean Torture Island, was it?" He scoots closer, ankle dragging up Bucky's calf, forcing the leg of Bucky's pants higher, exposing him to the cool air. "With the waves crashing around us just like this?" 

"_I'm_ gonna murder _you_ this time," Bucky manages to say regardless. "Just watch."

"Do your worst."

He does his very best, makes a little gun with both his hands and aims it at Steve and says, "Pow, pow," and Steve twists and ducks dramatically and hisses, "Nice try, _villain!_"

And then, well, maybe gulls will steal their abandoned meal, but it's worth it, the two of them up and shrieking, running, Bucky _pow powing _his finger guns at Steve and Steve ducking, twisting, doing a goddamn backflip like a showoff who really _could _make a killing passing the hat on the train if he so chose. Until finally Steve gives, grants permission for an imaginary bullet to hit him square in the heart, and clutches his chest. Feigning gurgling, he slumps to the ground, and Bucky sits on his hips and crows over the limp defeated body of his enemy until Steve lunges up, says, "Fooled you—"

Gulls don't steal _all _of their meal. Just half the sandwiches, and a cookie or three.

Later, both of them full—or at least claiming to be full in spite of their accidental donation to the local avian population's soup kitchen—they're sprawled on their backs, Steve safe behind sunglasses and Bucky with an arm thrown over his eyes, listening to a podcast about old Hollywood on Steve's phone, despite Bucky's token protest that podcasts are bullshit pale imitations of radio shows.

Now Bucky's got a podcast-worthy thought of his own, turning over anew in his brain every time he licks the backs of his teeth and finds a new caught bit of peach to worry at with a fingernail.

"Hey," he says, jabbing at the touch screen to slice off the tail end of, "...legislating what could not and would not be shown—" He can make an educated guess at what comes next. 

"Hey, yourself," Steve says, kicking at his foot, now safely and warmly re-shod in a combat boot. "What's up?"

"Should make a pie."

"Oh, I should?" His arm lifts off his eyes so he can give Bucky an incredulous look, propping himself up with his elbows behind him.

"The 'we' was implied, I thought. But then you, uh, should. Well, no."

"I love this plan, Buck. You know what I like most? The part where you said it so I know what it is."

"_I'm thinking_. Let's make two pies. One we eat, and then we say we're saving the other for later, right?"

"We'll need more fruit." He kicks at the empty basket. Bucky's handsome, heroic guy: states the obvious; loves to kick.

"We'll get more fruit."

"Probably more eggs and butter."

"Then we'll get more eggs and butter."

"Okay, Mr. Moneybags. We get more groceries. We make two pies. That it?"

"Of course not. We say we're saving the rest for later, but then _you _go into, you know, the cellar, and you dig a hole."

"The landlord might have something to say about that." 

"'The landlord?' Sure. The landlord. Steven G. Rogers, siding with a landlord. Don't know who, but someone's turnin' in my Arlington grave."

"I'm just _saying_—"

"You can fill it back in later if you're _so _troubled by The Landlord's feelings. What's this landlord even named? Look, let me—"

"Oh."

"What?"

"Are you telling me a jerk-off fantasy?"

"Um."

"Ha! Okay, go on." Steve rolls over, so half his weight's braced on Bucky and their faces are close. His hand gropes around out of Bucky's eyeline, approximately same location as the mess of their meal, until a muscle jumps in his cheek with satisfaction.

And then the cool flat of a knife appears at Bucky's throat. The blade's gentle swoop, like the top of a wave and great for spreading mustard on bread, fits wonderfully tucked up in the softness of his under-jaw. "Hey," Bucky says again, softer.

Again, Steve says, "Go on. You better tell me what you're getting hot about. Get off to it yet or just brainstorming?"

"Brainstorm. Comforting."

"Go on."

"You dig a hole, deep as you can, and you lay a blanket over it. Red and white gingham." Their actual picnic blanket, a beach towel emblazoned with a simultaneously smushed and stretched artist's rendering of Thor—a housewarming gift from Thor himself—wouldn't do. "And you put the pie on top. Gotta weight the blanket corners somehow, I guess."

"Weight them."

"So the pie doesn't fall in, dumbass."

"I've got a knife at your throat."

"Sorry, honey. But really. The blanket has to support the pie, but can't be too obvious, right, 'cause you're gonna devise a reason for me to go down there. And I'm gonna see the pie, and I'm gonna walk right onto the blanket—"

"And then I've got you trapped in a hole. I see."

"Yeah! And you could do _anything _with me once I'm in there."

"I can always do anything with you."

"Except laugh at me for being stuck in a hole."

That puts a calculating look on Steve's face, and Bucky's patient until an equal sign pops up, and on the other side of it, Steve plonks down, "I think we should practice."

"Practice. Pie?"

"No." His voice has turned pie-deliciously condescending. "Practice me laughing at you for being stuck in a hole."

"And how are you gonna—"

"We're surrounded by sand, genius. I think I'll find a way."

Suddenly Bucky can take a full breath again; it's embarrassing how he audibly gasps the very second Steve's off him, and the embarrassment of it makes Steve's face light up, so. Good. "You shoveling with your hands?" he manages after clearing his throat.

It's not just the big cartoon anvil he had on top of him that has his lungs and words not operating at full capacity: The bridge of Steve's nose and tips of his ears are faintly sunburnt, and his movements are sure, methodical, as he empties the few remaining items from the picnic basket, setting them on the blanket. He's got really big hands. That's another nice fact about him.

"Nope. But you can use those paws to help me if you like." Steve stands, bringing the basket with him, sand clinging to his knees. Jealousy tumbles through Bucky's stomach at how he pats the basket's bottom proprietarily. That's the ideal way to be: hollow, wicker, and handled. Not that he doesn't come close on the regular, as close as a very physically dense cyborg can come.

Handled: they've got that down plenty. And with each basketful of sand Steve lifts and dumps to the side, it's like a basketful of anxiety's scooped out of Bucky, watching a dip form in the land, the right size and shape about for him to nestle comfortably for as long as Steve wants him there, so: Hollow? Close enough.

No point in using his _paws _to help, but he does it anyway. Kneeling in the sand by Steve's feet, pressing his hands together like he's fetching a cool drink from a stream. Some other time, he'll take care picking out the little shells, blue and white and taupe and often chipped like old china, take them home and line them up on his dresser. For now, they flash their miniature whorls at him like ankles in quick glimpses as he does his menial labor. As he instead treasures the way tiny grains settle to line the slivers of head-heart-life in one palm, while the other hand seals up hermetic and sand slides straight off. Both feelings at a time.

And next to him, performing his own more efficient drudgery, Steve fucking whistles. Like a Snow White dwarf, but it's music from a fucking _Target _commercial that bombarded them last night. "Shut up," Bucky mutters, and knocks his forehead against Steve's knee. Steve only whistles louder, and Bucky only knocks his head against his knee harder, so Steve says, "Okay, in the hole with you," and presses a big warm hand to the back of the neck. Like he's been yoked, Bucky goes easy where that insistent hard heat steers him, lying on his back in the indent they've made.

The sun's lower now, but he still grimaces and squints one eye, shielding the other with his hand, until Steve hands over his sunglasses. The real prize there is how much easier it is to look at Steve through big blue aviators. Not just because he's backlit by a massive gleaming butter pat of a sun. It would be safer and easier indoors too, studying the exact shape of his nose—that particular harsh-wobbly line Bucky likes to sketch out in the margins of scripts and manuscripts— or contemplating the way one eye droops shut without the other, the laziest wink. How it droops now, as Steve stares at him, hands on hips, imperious, the basket forgotten momentarily.

"Look what I captured," he says.

"Not really captured," Bucky says, and feints like he's going to get right up and crawl away. Steve cuts him short by stepping on his hand. Bucky allows it, taking on the attitude of a Raggedy Andy doll.

"You will be," Steve explains, putting more pressure on Bucky's hand, "When I've covered you back up."

"Do I get a sculpted mermaid tail?"

"You get what I decide to give you. And no bitching. And help me cover you, all right?"

"If I must," Bucky says, and grins at him, and this time as he scoops handfuls of sand from nearby to cover himself, he allows his eyes to linger longer on the miniature shells, which contained miniature creatures, and now contain the little crumbs of his heart getting as scattered in the sand as crumbs from their earlier sandwiches. And sure some of the shells must _inevitably _work their ways into his pockets by virtue of sand working its way into every cranny, and that's none of his business, or won't be until he gets home and excavates his riches.

-

They swing back by the farmer's market on their way home, grabbing up the grocery list items that woulda spoiled if they took them on their beach getaway, or that they just didn't want ladening down the basket. Including extra fruit and eggs and butter, when Bucky mutters, "Trapped in a hole," as a reminder.

Steve slides a hand into Bucky's back pocket. In Bucky's ear, intimate as the hand on his ass, he whispers "How 'bout I trap something in _your _hole when we get home?"

Bucky feels himself flush and says, "Um," because there's no better response to a very good plan.

The last thing Steve pays for with a duckbill of crumpled ones from deep in his pocket is ginger root in the vague cartoon shape of a cactus. Its stubby arms are kinda cute. Nestling it safely in the basket among eggs and butter, a circle of brie, a murder of peaches, a hank of turkey bacon, an impulse baguette, he throws Bucky a wink. Bucky licks his lips and winks back. And for the walk home, he slings an arm over Steve's shoulders, tugging him in close.

"How trapped we talking?" Ahead, the turning sky's pink-blue divides neatly as a Neopolitan ice cream sandwich.

"Well," Steve whispers back, and Bucky's stomach flutters just from the whispering, the feeling that despite any sunshine and crowds and muscles, they're two kids huddled in a dark blanket fort, swapping ghost stories. "We do have that new duct tape. Or it could be trapped 'cause I say so. 'Cause you're gonna be good for me and leave it there."

"Oh, well. Don't know about 'good,' but." He clears his throat. "Well, if I gotta."

Now, Steve pulls away a bit, grinning, talking normal for, "What do you think? Pfft. 'If you gotta.' You will be."

"Ixnay the oodgay," Bucky mumbles, feeling shy and coveted. Kissing Steve under the ear is a good reason to reel him back in closer. God, the freedom to publicly display affection casual as a necktie is a gift. Even if he knows that freedom's bought only partially by the shining future, and a whole lot helped along by their being big jacked guys no one's especially scrambling to heckle.

God bless being big jacked guys, then.

Once they've put away all groceries but the ginger, Bucky hands over a knife. Steve hands over the proclamation, "Go shower. Your ass is probably already stuffed with sand."

"Yeah _someone _tried to bury me alive."

"You looked so cute in a sculpted tuxedo. Now. Stat." He turns Bucky around with hands on his shoulders and sends him off with a smack on the ass.

The stats: He showers in record time, four minutes twenty-seven seconds, water at one-hundred-and-eleven degrees and hitting him with all the force of a noodle-armed six-year-old heaving a bowling ball, revealing that the amount of sand stuffing his ass was no more than a thimble's worth, thank you very much, Steven, obviously, logically, seeing as he was wearing tight-to-the-skin jogging pants instead of loose-waisted, gape-legged swim trunks.

The real sand situation is under all ten of his nails, and between his toes, and crumbs clinging to his ankle hair, where it was bared by his rolled cuffs, and inside his ears in an unpleasant crust reminding him of dried blood from mornings he wakes up to find he's been trying to claw himself deaf in his sleep. More than anything, sand riddles the hair of his head, but he declines to deal with that thoroughly just yet, instead doing a quick rinse-and-fingercomb, throwing in leave-in conditioner, and balling the all of it on top of his head like a skein of yarn.

Six minutes and ten seconds after Steve sent him off to wash, a towel-dried Bucky drops to his knees on the kitchen floor.

"Oh, there you are," Steve says carelessly, turning from his work at the counter. He's got a knife in one hand and the partially denuded ginger in the other. So far, it lacks its proper shape. The air is rich with spice. "Been waiting to explain."

"Explain? Thought it was on the straightforward side." 

"What is?"

"The ginger goes up my ass. And it hurts."

"Yeah. But you're only thinking—" He taps his temple with the knife handle— "on one level. Which is impressive for something like you. I'll give you that. However. Hands and knees."

Bucky drops forward. Now, seeing Steve requires straining his eyes up harder, makes him feel like a begging puppy. But Steve cuts that short, coming to kneel next to him. Grasping the base in a circle of finger and thumb like an improvised cock ring, he holds the ginger up in front of Bucky's face. Makes it his whole world. The smell makes Bucky want to stick his tongue out and lick its unevenly clad, damp shaft, maybe take a chomp, but he chooses to be good.

His reward is Steve, in his patient teacher voice, explaining, "See, the ginger is you. Your asshole is the hole I dig in the ground. And you're the pie."

"You calling me sweet or something, Rogers?"

"Why would I do that?" Steve leans in awkwardly to lick a stripe up Bucky's spine, making him yelp. "Just like I thought. You taste like a sewage plant."

"Shouldn't I taste like dirt?"

"You mean like corn chips?"

Bucky laughs. "Yeah! But look, how is my asshole a hole in the dirt if I'm the pie? Doesn't that make it a hole in a pie?"

"It's a hole in your _ass_, not a hole in you. Your ass is dirt." He waves the ginger in Bucky's face like a wagging finger.

"I think this metaphor has some problems. We might wanna draw a diagram."

"'Pssh, 'Metaphor.' 'Diagram.' Who taught an empty-headed little thing like you words like that?"

"Would've been, what, third grade? So Miss Collier**.** Some of us paid attention in class."

Steve pinches him where his thigh and ass meet, just a quick needle-ish sting. "Some of us were _absent _because we were _sick_."

"Delinquent," Bucky hides in a fake cough.

Another pinch, followed by tutting and sighing, a combination that could make a guy fall in love if he weren't already. "Hush now, honey. Let me work. Don't worry your empty head about metaphors." Another lick up Bucky's spine before he stands makes Bucky shiver, but Steve pays him no mind.

Letting Steve work is primarily a production of watching the backs of Steve's knees and listening to complaints. "Goddamn fibers," The Voice From Somewhere Above the Backs of Steve's Knees hisses. "Where does it _get _all these fibers?" 

Bucky sits up, stretching his neck in a way he'll regret later, attempting to see the fibers in question but still not succeeding from down here. "You could've had me do that, y'know. Probably go easier _and _would have the whole, you know, 'go cut your own switch,' piece to it."

"Uh-huh. You haven't done this before. I've practiced. That's why."

"Who says I haven't done it before?"

Steve's voice and forehead wrinkles when he about-faces both spell out genuine uncertainty, and Bucky immediately feels bad for fucking with him, more bad than the situation calls for. "You have?"

"No. Sorry."

"Then _reality _says, stupid. Now get back down there." Chastened, Bucky immediately returns to all fours. "And not even you could make this piece of shit vegetable have even ten percent fewer fibers."

"Why have _you_ done it before?" Bucky asks, lacing the words with teasing even as he does plainly want to hear the plain-obvious answer voiced aloud.

"Gee, Buck. Can't imagine. For my _health_."

"Come on," he wheedles. "Why've you been doing it?"

Steve turns, knife still in hand and pointed, if you drew a dotted line through the air, approximately at the soft hollow of Bucky's throat. Bucky's Adam's apple bobs with the thought of Steve's hand loosing it like a dart at a _Guinness World Record_ page. Like a dart in a smoky bar when they were nineteen and too young to know quite how to love each other right, but trying. A smile's walked halfway onto Steve's face, its other half still concealed behind the door of his teeth; just taking a look around! Steve says, "So needy. If I'm not talking shit at you every moment of the day you go crazy, huh?"

"Already crazy, dummy. Come on. Maybe I'm too stupid to figure it out."

"Nope. No one's that stupid, not even you. You have some things in your head, after all. You know how to get fucked, tie your shoes, do simple math. And you know that I've been practicing for you. What, like you weren't gonna want ginger up your little hole eventually? The amount you beg for the IcyHot. Beg me to beat you there. Beg to get fucked without enough lube."

"With spit."

"With spit. Good luck with that."

"Thanks."

Clearly oozing fondness as he turns back to the cutting board: "You can't get enough of me hurting that thing for you. It's a full-time job."

"What do I pay you?" The air grows spicier. The little slick _snicking _noises of the knife on the ginger are a comfort.

"Whatever I tell you to."

"Sounds right. You almost done?"

"Gimme a second. Shut up."

Bucky lifts a hand to zip and lock his lips. Tosses the key onto the kitchen counter for Steve despite how Steve's not looking. It's the principle of the thing. Gotta stick to your mouth-locking, key-trusting guns. 

"There," Steve says, putting the knife down louder than strictly necessary. "Fetch me a glass of water, huh, pal?"

"I can get up?"

"No, use your telekinetic powers to get it down, stupid."

"I love you." He winces as he stands, popping his back, twisting his neck around. Watching, leaned against the counter, Steve frowns and tries to conceal the frown. It's a frown all in the eyes, his mouth a calculated level of straight. "I'm good," Bucky clarifies as he fishes a glass from the cabinet.

"But watch me try to say that."

"Ha. You can do what you like."

"But you'll bitch about it."

"But I'll bitch about it. Sorry, dear."

"Your prerogative. Hand that over." 

The ginger goes _plunk _into the water, glass held close to Steve's chest. Like he wants to absorb it into him, and then cut his chest open and stuff his gingery heart up Bucky's ass. As if that's not essentially the same as what they're about to do. 

Steve with his already gingery heart says, "Now, I don't think you took long enough in the shower. You're probably still disgusting. It's bath time. March."

"March or crawl?"

"Dealer's choice what he wants to deal with. I'd carry you if it weren't for the glass."

"Bet you'd carry me if the glass broke."

"Yes. And you'd whine about it relentlessly. So let's keep our telekinetic glass-breaking powers to ourselves, huh?"

"I'm telling Magneto you're oppressing my mutation."

"I notice someone's not crawling _or _marching." That raised eyebrow is an unparalleled champ at making Bucky feel small.

"Sorry," he says, ducking his head to hide his smile and then thinking better of it. Hiding things like that will make Steve really make him sorry, just like dawdling more, so he goes, and Steve smiles back, and Steve goes, leading the way, unfairly fast with his long legs. No going soft, waiting for Bucky to catch up, as Bucky drops back down to hands and knees and scurries after.

Tile's tile, same as always, and same as tile, sanded-down wood's hard and smooth against his palms on the hallway crawl, the matted carpet ripped away in a recent craving for busyness. They're thinking about replacements, thinking about shag, but there's something to be said for this, the lemon-scented dark gleam and how he'll be left bruised. Each staple holding the carpet down carefully wormed free in Bucky's metal pincers, and all sit beneath his floorboard, gathered in an iridescent mesh bag so no one gets separated from the others. All cozy with the wires, old earbuds, bolts and an arduino board and fiddlybits and scrap metal rescued from sidewalk trash.

Steve's eyelashes would fit in well among the long, dark wires. On one side, they rest against his cheekbone, casting shadows, as he turns from the bathroom doorway to watch Bucky with a lazy wink. The asshole ruins/enhances the peace of that image by stuffing two fingers in his mouth and whistling, loud and high, a _be here now_. "Come on, boy," he coos. "I've seen people move faster to get tonsillectomies. You want this or not?"

"You _know _I do. I'm coming." He fails not to sound squishy inside.

"Not yet, you aren't."

"You know, it's a joke that never stops giving."

"Fucktoys dont't need new jokes. They'd go right over your little airhead."

Bucky beams. Crawling faster hurts more, thank god. His patellas bump bump on the wood in less-than-racehorse rhythm. Maybe the rhythm of a horse-for-hire circling Central Park, pulling tourists and wearing a feathered headband like it's Mardi Gras. That could be him, pulling Steve, but he only pulls himself for now, to the finish line of the bathroom, where Steve's got his lips pursed, hands on his hips, but that damn dark-lashed eyelid still drooped, insouciant as lounging slouchily on a park bench.

It would be a crime, therefore, if Bucky didn't pause at the threshold to lick his lips, wetting them in preparation for dropping down and pressing a kiss to the white rubber toe of Steve's sneaker. Then higher up. Sand clings to the bright red canvas in places, like a sugar scrub for his lips. He liked that when he tried it, and likes this, if for different reasons. 

Above him, Steve makes a noise between a gasp and clearing his throat. He flexes the top of his foot so Bucky's nose is scrunched up flat, its breath cut off. Making him breathe heavier through his kissing mouth, breath probably warm through the fabric. The sneaker's hard toe raises, tipping up Bucky's chin, until he gets the message and tips his eyes up too. Staring down at him, Steve's starry-eyed, embarrassing to witness, but Bucky witnesses as long as he's implicitly told to, the shoe still a firm presence holding him up.

"Other one," Steve says softly. "Now." 

Bucky shifts, repeating his performance. This shoe's less sandy, as though Steve spent the day hopping on one foot along the beach. The canvas and laces taste notably of nothing. Steve sweeps his foot side to side, petting under Bucky's jaw with the rubber. Bucky lays an open-mouthed sloppy kiss over the metal rivulets where the laces disappear. Dips his tongue into one, then another, making his way up the row, the taste of coins and the rough rub of the surrounding canvas combining to make his mouth feel like the bitter, white inside of a grapefruit peel. He could do this all day, but—

Steve clears his throat, just shy of sounding like an incipient aroused coughing fit. His calves arch back the lightest bit with his new downward bent; the blade edge of a hand taps Bucky's shoulder. Bucky scrambles up too quick. Steve's still bent over. Hard skull collides with sharp chin and they both yelp. The loud clack of teeth and luckily no scent of bloody tongue bite, but Bucky's head rings, the spot where Steve's chin jabbed him (or where he jabbed it) a hot pulse of blood that _should _smell iron. But it all stays safely inside his head, making him sway a moment as he still obeys, getting up on one knee with the other leg squared up in front of him.

Steve's rubbing his jaw when he says, "Thanks."

"Yeah, your greatest welcomes."

"For doing what I told you. I wasn't being sarcastic, Buck."

"Oh. Well. Your greatest welcomes regardless, I guess, only genuine. Sorry."

"My fault." Bucky scoffs at him. "_My fault_, fuckhole. And we'll both survive. Now, in the bathroom. Get."

Steve knows how hot Bucky likes his baths, so there's a moment of suspense before his hand touches down on the taps; how he plans to play this is a big question mark. A wide range of temperatures register as irritatingly cold to Bucky without crossing over into chase-his-balls-back-into-his-body-like-they-saw-a-ghost-and-also-cause-a-panic-attack icy. So that's one solid option: a cool bath contrasting with the incipient burn. Bucky eyes the ginger in its own glass-bound cold bath on the sink, where it's gathering its resources, preparing to invade his body and scorch its earth.

That must be enough cold baths for one room. Shirt riding up in the back to show pale, sand-smudged skin, Steve leans over the taps and turns hot all the way to on and gives cold only the mildest squeaking twist. So he's feeling indulgent. Seeking to overwhelm.

The rush of water, as always, sounds like elephants playing dodgeball. Steve sits on the tub's lip, body angled toward Bucky, but twisting at the shoulders so he can dip one hand into the water and swirl it around. Kneeling on the bathmat, Bucky licks his suddenly dry lips. He's caught here, waiting, no idea how full Steve wants the bath, what he's gonna do to him in the bath, whether he'll hold him under, or if it's just the ginger's time to shine.Which makes his stomach flip pleasantly. Which makes it backflip with genuine fear.

The closer that thing being stuffed up his hole comes to reality, the more his brain runs off in unrealistic directions. The more he pictures Bugs Bunny's teeth chomping on a carrot. He swallows, clears his throat. "Steve, uh. Don't jostle me too much once it's in? I'm kinda freaked out about it breaking off."

Steve neck swivels sharply, eyes narrowed on him. "Buck, we don't hafta—"

"No, I want to. I really want to." Steve looks just short of dubious. "Wanted for a while, you _know _that." Steve's eyebrows and lips say that yeah, yeah, fine, he knows. "It's just—" He gestures vaguely at his brain. "Bullshit. So don't jostle me too much."

"Say please when you want something."

"Sorry. Please."

"Please what?"

"Please don't move me around too much, Steve."

"When?"

"When—In 2053, Steve. In January when I was fifteen. What the fuck do you mean?"

Steve sighs. "''Please don't jostle me too much, Steve, most handsome and brilliant man I've ever met, after you stick that ginger butt plug up my slutty, disrespectful little ass.' See? Easy." 

"You want me to spit that back exactly?"

"Unless you think of something better. Yes."

"The work I put in around here. Geeze. Please don't—"

"The work _you _put in? Who carved this thing?"

"_Please_," Bucky repeats louder, "don't jostle me too much, Steven Grant Rogers, most handsome and brilliant and hardworking—Is that sufficient?—pain in my ass I've ever met, after you stick that ginger butt plug up my slutty, disrespectful little ass. Please." Without his permission, his voice gets small toward the end, but good enough. Not like it wavers.

"All right. Since you asked so sweet. Now." With a nod to himself like he just solved a complicated equation, he twists off the taps. "In the water. Knees. Hand on the wall, above the taps. Lean forward." He stands up, circling around behind Bucky, wrapping a ready hand around the ginger's glass.

Bucky shuffles forward on his knees, not wanting to stand and break the spell of a small voice, a small self. He scales and climbs over the tub wall with the care of someone breaking into a top secret government facility, easing his way into the water knee by knee. The tub's only half full, so his ass and still-soft-but-gaining-interest dick are well out of the water, which is hot as a hard-working mouth; he feels himself going pink with it.

Hands against the wall, he closes his eyes, holds his mouth open, embracing the contrast of the cooler room and the water's near-burn, the frustration of not sinking all the way down. "There we go," Steve says. "You just wait like a statue for me." A couple footsteps, and the gentle thud of knees on the bathmat. A big hand on the small of his back, and it isn't hot as the water but oughta be. Oughta be a brand. "Ugliest fucking statue I ever saw."

"That's why no museums wanted me."

"Hush. They all did. What brings in crowds like a spectacle?"

"But you stole me? Did a heist."

"Yes, and I said hush. All right. Here we go." The hand smooths down his back to his ass, grabbing one cheek hard and pulling it to the side.

It should be impossible. The ginger's wet head prods at Bucky's hole and he does his best to relax all his muscles, to welcome it in, but it's _so _big—okay, not that big, really, barely two fingers around, but in a lubeless context, which makes all the difference—and his hole, as Steve loves to tell him sugary-mockingly, is _so _small. But Steve's not a quitter, and finally it's sliding inside, solid as anything else good in this world.

And then there's a moment where maybe it's impossible after all, where he feels suddenly certain that it can't go any further in, and he knows it needs to go further in, hasn't felt the base settle against him yet. But Steve says like gentling a horse, "Relax," and gives a tough little shove, and there. Teamwork makes the ass-reaming work. His hole clenches around the thing's tapered neck. At first, it just feels like nothing but any other lovely intrusion, no immediate burn, not how he pictured.

Steve's fingers tap hard at the base, and the jolt to his core feels bouncy, a rubber-band-ball goodness. He grunts and lets his eyelids fall shut. More taps, a little lighter and bouncy themselves, teasingly send the rubber band ball ricocheting through him more, eliciting more grunts. There's no burn, still, but if this is all there is, it's plenty.

Tapping, tapping, practically a woodpecker, down there—despite the pleasure of it, Bucky hasn't quite yet got a wooden pecker down there, ha ha ha—Steve says, "Imagine if I were _actually _hitting you with this in. With the wooden spoon, maybe. Maybe my running shoe."

Bucky's whimper is half at the harder tap Steve gives the base, half at the thought of Steve's disgusting running shoe that's been all over the New York pavement smacking at his skin, putting him in his place. He wouldn't _deserve _something cleaner, or the effort to find a better implement. Steve would come home from his run and find Bucky—Who knows? Attempting to fellate himself, or stealing Steve's rancid meatball heroes out of the trash and putting them back in the fridge. And Steve would just pull off his running shoe right there and tip Bucky over his knee.

He says, "I'm. Imagining."

"Good. I'd alternate sides, really be nice to you by keeping it even. But every now and then—" Bouncing jolt after bouncing jolt, so much more intense than it ought to be, as he punctuates each word with an almost insultingly light tap—"I'd smack you right over this. And you'd fucking howl."

And like that, he stops. Without thinking about it, Bucky whines, "_Steve_." 

"Hmm."

"Why'd you stop?"

"Wait a second."

Turns out the burn was just being polite, waiting for its turn on the swings. Now that the rubber-band-ball pleasure's gone, it hops right on up and gets to swinging. Not the constant burn of the IcyHot, but a long string of quick, immediately receding burns. Like the tip of his tongue when it's scorched by hot coffee. But in that case, the tongue goes a little numb after. Here, he stays sensitive, peeled in preparation for the next pain.

As each small burn comes and goes, waves crashing and then pulled away by the tide, he only feels more and more skinned alive. "_Steve_."

"Mm-hmm."

"Fuck, that's good."

"It better be. You wouldn't like what I'd do to you if you didn't like it."

"Yeah, no—Oh, fuck—shit. If I didn't like what you were doing to me, no, I wouldn't—Mm—like what you were doing to me. No shit."

Steve scoffs, and smacks Bucky on the ass. He tightens around the ginger, and there we go; the burn goes deeper now than the tip of the tongue. "You understand what future tense is. Don't get smart."

"Can't. You know that." The smack wasn't even necessary for forcing his ass tight. Now that Steve's not hammering away at it, the ginger feels like it's threatening to come out, and his hole works helplessly around it in response, squeezing like a neurotic fist with a stress ball. The sting comes newly alive each time, despite the limits reality should place on how many times a thing can live; each time he's reminded of the solidity, of how he's stuffed full.

Still no wooden pecker down there, only flying at half-mast, but that's okay. This is plenty, its own kind of long, diffuse orgasm.

Steve hums and says, "I can't see your face. I don't like that. Turn forty-five degrees clockwise."

Bucky takes his hands off the wall and feels like he oughta have a fainting couch to catch him. When he's turned properly, facing out at the bathroom, hands dangling, fingertips skimming the hot water, his hole has to work even harder to hang onto the thing hurting it, to keep hurting itself now that he's not bent over. The burn heads deep.

Steve grins at him. "Hi."

Bucky grins back. "Hey, sailor."

"You're the one in the water."

"Where's my ship?"

"Stole it from you. I'm a pirate. Arr."

"Arr," Bucky agrees, nodding sagely, wishing he were a parrot on Steve's shoulder at all times.

"Here, lean over. Down, down." He presses a big hand between Bucky's shoulder blades until Bucky's a right angle, with his chest shoved into the lip of the tub. "Good boy."

"Steven."

"Shush. There we go." He scratches at the spot where he pressed, just a light movement of nails, tracing a circle. Like he's drawing a sigil for demon-summoning on the floor. Bucky's the floor. The ginger's the demon. A very friendly demon. That dirt and pie bullshit was the incorrect metaphor for the moment, and that's why Bucky's the one who gets paid to put words together.

He's a demon-summoning floor in the midst of being gently mopped. Hot water _shh_es against the underside of his ass, a soothing counterpoint to the more insistent heat inside him. Not much interested in soothing, he spreads his knees, tips himself further over the tub's lip. The ache of it, a broad line shoved into his pecs, worsens. 

Maybe he shouldn't be moving from how Steve put him, but it should be a nicer view for Steve; if he ducks down a bit, he can see Bucky's face, exposed with his hair all pulled up in its knot. If he leans forward, he should get an eyeful of the ginger's base between Bucky's asscheeks, his quickly clenching and relaxing hole, his balls hanging heavy and brushing the hot water same as his ass was before he needed to hurt more. They feel full, but not urgently so, same as how he's maybe five eighths of the way to a wooden pecker now but not fussed about getting further.

His ass is kind of the point right now. How it—

"How's it feel?" Steve asks, sounding smug, choosing the view of Bucky's face. Ducking and covering like Bucky's head is a schooldesk, and smiling up at him, that goofy, gathering-infotainment smile where his gums show. Bucky licks his lips, pulls his tongue roughly between his teeth.

The point: how it, "Burns. Fuck, it—And my chest hurts, and, it's just—It's so _solid_."

"Your chest or the ginger?"

"Ha. Both. Fuck."

"Not afraid it's gonna break off anymore?"

"More afraid it'll fall out."

"Good. But it falls out, you know—" He laughs like at a private joke or accomplishment, and kisses Bucky right over one gold bumblebee earring. His mouth is a whisper in itself, brushing faintly against the soft skin of Bucky's ear, moving to where the seashell of it opens, and would it sound like the ocean if Steve pressed his own ear to Bucky's shimmering ear? A more literal whisper tells him, "You won't like the consequences."

"Yeah, you sure about that?" A sharp intake of air as Steve tugs him, by one shoulder, even further over the tub's lip, and gravity draws the ginger juices further inside him, a flare of lava at his center. The jostling—allowed now—has him less afraid of the thing breaking than of it falling out, a stupid-kid fear like cowering from the monster under the bed. Sudden emptiness is much scarier than the thought of any consequences from Steve could ever be.

Steve says, "I'm always sure of everything I say. You know that."

"One of your best and worst qualities, yeah." Bucky swallows. He can't remember how long it's been, or quite how long this feeling's supposed to last. There's no way of guaranteeing how long he'll suffer, how long he'll feel perfectly hot and hurt.

Steve sighs, and says, "Gosh, it's so hard deciding how to arrange the furniture. Let's try this." Both his hands settle on Bucky's hips, tugging toward himself, shuffling backward on his knees so Bucky doesn't fully headbutt him in the gut. And Bucky has to scramble to keep up, to get his arms folded under him at the right angle for pillowing his head. The hard, direct press of his kneecaps into the porcelain tub drags the first whimper out of him, and his feet plant against the wall, holding him steady. His ass rests centered on the tub's lip like over Steve's lap.

"Better?" he gasps.

"Hmm. Yeah, it looks better at an angle. They don't pay me to design sets for nothing."

"They pay you nothing," Bucky corrects, and that earns him Steve's hand twisting sharply at the base of the ginger. Now that the first whimper's out, the dam has apparently broken. A series of pinches down his thigh reel in yet more whimpers from the wet fishing hole of his mouth, tugged by both the pinches' own sharp sting and the slower sting they invite along when he clenches around the ginger in response. "Steve," he murmurs.

Steve says, "Are you gonna get off from this?"

"I don't think so. I think—" One heavy hand rests possessive, expectant on his ass. "Wanna cuddle with you." He's so warm inside; his knees and the tops—currently bottoms—of his calves are so warm inside the water; his face is warm, blood surging to it both from the position and from being called _the furniture_.

"Yeah?"

"Wanna be your lapdesk."

"Hmm. We can arrange that. Here." With a parting spank, loudened by the water clinging to Bucky's ass, he helps Bucky up and out, onto hands and knees on the floor. The weirdly sexual sucking sound of water draining begins out of view, and then there's Steve again, roughly toweling him off. But still not removing the ginger. The sting has been fading to a duller roar, though moving from the tub woke it up again, just a quick interlude. How sometimes Steve will jolt awake from a nap, mutter insistent nonsense, then fall right back to the deep dreaming Bucky always prays he'll get. 

He watches Steve's legs in their wrinkled dark jeans, his feet in socks patterened with little bright choo choo trains, a gift from Natasha. One's got a hole at the ankle, Steve's ankles weaponishly bony, somehow, as they always were. Leaning over Bucky to get all of him with the towel, he casts a wide shadow on the bathmat, which is a plush relief on Bucky's knees after the porcelain. Mostly, Steve never goes _too _hard on his kneecaps, but the occasional practically-a-whack-from-a-broadsword is appreciated.

Mostly dry and with the towel now draped over his back, water draining behind him, he suspects that Steve's whistling-accompanied puttering isn't in the service of anything beyond making him wait. But he can be patient, not whine, not when he just asked for something, and at least it's not the Target commercial song this time. So he lets his head hang as Steve opens and closes the medicine cabinet, fiddles with the taps, takes a piss and flushes the toilet. Finally, the towel leaves his back, and he hears and feels the _whoosh _of Steve swinging it over the shower rod to dry.

Then he sits down in front of Bucky, pretzel-legged, and grips his chin with forefinger and thumb, raising his head so they can do the intense eye contact thing. His intense eyes are soft, squinty. He says, "Hey, little lapdesk. Living room time. I gotta book I want to read to you."

Bucky grins. "To your lapdesk? You read to the furniture much?"

"Every chance I get. And sometimes?" He drops to a whispers. "It even reads back!" A laugh. "The future, huh?" In a complicated move that's gymnastic on both their parts, he flips Bucky over and scoops him up into a bridal carry, like they're on the Meditteranean torture island. The bathroom's certainly steamy enough to pass.

"Taking the ginger out yet?" Bucky asks with a grunt as his sphincter muscles work wildly to keep it inside despite the new position.

"Nope!" His _p _pops obnoxiously. "I said I would trap it in your hole and I meant it."

A massive yawn springs from Bucky, contagious, passed to Steve like a hot potato, and Bucky admires Steve's teeth while his mouth is open. All he can manage to say to the ginger staying trapped is, "Mm. Okay."

Steve's, "Hm," is half laugh and half thoughtful. "I like you like this. Dumb and pliant. Lord knows you get dumb—sorry, dumber—enough having anything up inside of you, but—" He clicks his tongue, and takes a second to kiss Bucky's forehead. Bucky blows a kiss in response. "This? Should do it at least once a week, maybe. Just to keep you behaving."

"Lotta money to spend on ginger."

"I think we can eat the cost."

"Shouldn't eat the ginger, though. I know you'll eat anything, but—"

Steve snorts. "All right, maybe I was wrong about it making you well-behaved. Guess we'll keep looking for something that powerful."

"I'm a real menace. Y'know. Slingshot and all."

"Now there's a thought. Haven't tried taking a slingshot to your ass."

"And here I thought we'd tried everything. Falling asleep on the job, Rogers."

The second Steve has him down on the couch, and positioned desk-like over his lap, he pops Bucky on the ass for that. It shocks Bucky same as the taps to the base from earlier, and he moans into the couch cushions. Steve says, "Yeah, I know. But you deserved that one," which is the nicest thing anyone could ever say to another person.

Only absent of fanfare, Bucky's ass draped over his lap and a blanket draped over Bucky, deep voice describing the bleaching of coral and Bucky beginning to drowse, does Steve's hand slip under the blanket and tug the ginger free in one slick move, wrapping it in a nearby tissue. The closest thing to fanfare is how he presses a kiss to the tip of Bucky's ear before continuing, "'Would we be able to swim back to the station? Would we even be able to figure out the right direction to swim in?'"

The ghost of a burn remains in Bucky's ass, just enough for him to shiver, though that might be the kiss, or the hand that snakes back under the towel to squeeze at his thigh, anchoring him to the world.

**-**  
  


****  
  


"I need to hang my shirt for tomorrow in the bathroom while you shower."

"Aw, afraid I'll get lonely?" Bucky just stares at him. "Yeah, yeah. But uh," Steve adds in clearly a fit of inspiration, crossing the bedroom to brush his fingertips across Bucky's cheek, "Say please."

Bucky turns his head to kiss Steve's palm, and murmurs into it, "Please."

"Now why do I feel like you're asking for something else?"

"Both."

"Yeah."

Blood to the surface, bright as a newly minted penny and sharp as a newly whetstoned knife. They puff identical breathy laughs, both their faces loosening into smiles, while the impact's crack still rings through the kitchen, reverberating on tile.

Cupping his hand over Bucky's hot cheek, Steve asks, "How'd your shirt get wrinkled?"

"Someone fucked me in it."

"Tsk. Without taking your shirt off? Impolite."

"Yeah, he is."

"Oh, another? Is that what I'm hearing?"

"Mm. Yep."

This smack doesn't ring or beckon Bucky's blood to the surface. It's more like a newspaper to the nose, all in the ball of the hand, and sounds like a basketball dribbling. Backward to a fault, Bucky follows it with a kiss and little licking bite to the pad of fat beneath Steve's pointer finger.

Steve hums, and watches him with half-lidded eyes, and finally says, "Go get me your shirt."

"Aye-aye."

He's just through the doorway when Steve stops him with, "Oh, the one covered in rabbits?"

Bucky swivels, gripping the doorway as he leans in. "One and the same."

"Then you should have said, 'Someone fucked me all the way out of my mind in it.'"

"I was summarizing. But." Hopefully his grin conveys both "starving wolf" and "wolf so full it had to change into pants with an elastic waist," because _that's _the sum of the situation as sense-memory swaggers through the door, dragging with it the swoopy-stomach pleasure of a hairbrush handle pounding his ass while bruises from a matching hairbrush bloomed deep in the surrounding muscle, the fat of his asscheeks bouncing with each impact and with each particularly jolting thrust of the handle, while his hands struggled to stay gripping the sweaty backs of his knees and blood rushed fuzzy to his head. "Yeah. He did."

"Good." Steve nods, all business. "Shirt. Now. I want to shower and I don't have time for your dillydallying."

"Yessir, Mr. Hygiene Queen, sir."

"I know where you sleep."

"That you saying you want me in yours tonight?"

"I'll want you on the floor tonight, you don't go get your fucking shirt. I try to do a guy a favor—"

"You're all talk," Bucky says, but he saunters off anyway, because he's a good friend and husband and because there really is a disgusting amount of sweat coming out of Steve's post-run body, so much so he should probably call a Hazmat team, but a shower post-haste will do. He gets his fuck-wrecked shirt, with its black and white pattern of bunnies, and pulls the retractable hook down out of the bathroom ceiling as Steve strips and climbs in the shower, disappearing behind dark blue like a hole beneath a picnic blanket. The one time in their relationship that _Steve _is the hole.

(If you don't count his seemingly endless capacity to take Bucky's pain and sorrow and bury it inside himself, keeping it safe and warm and shared. And who counts sappy shit like that? No one in this household, thank you.)

Once the shirt's hung, he fusses with the collar, buttoning it down into place, tugging at the crumpled right sleeve, and he should leave, should wash dishes or watch TV or change out of his plaid pajamas while he waits for the humidity to work its magic and for the wrinkles to fall away.

But he sits on the floor, and throws his head back against the cabinets behind the sink, closing his eyes, savoring the sound of water hitting Steve's solid, obstructive body, waiting for the room to fill with steam. To be humid as an island for tying the knot. For triple-knotting a knot that's been tied a long, long time.

**-**

It's not quite true that Steve _designs _sets, excluding the tableauxs he makes of Bucky in their apartment. His mastermindedness in that area is no one's business but theirs. However, teaching self-defense led to learning that one of the kids acts in a fledgling community theater company became volunteering to sew costumes for _The Importance of Being Earnest_ slid easily into Steve painting sets as well, like it's 1938 and Bucky can reliably ask for a smack in the sucker or a belt to his thighs by licking or biting the exposed jut of Steve's clavicle when he comes home with grass-green and barn-red flecked in his hair and his shirt unbuttoned impolitely because he was sweating on the set and he couldn't bother fixing himself up nice for the walk home.

All that's missing is that jutty collar bone, but Bucky's very good these days at using his words, and also there are plenty of other parts on Steve that he can kiss or bite to say please and thank you.

So Steve's got—Maybe he wouldn't call them friends, 'cause his bar's always been stupid-high on that front, but Bucky would say _friends_ were he the one going for drinks with the director, or hitting up a gallery opening to support one of the bit part players. 

And here Bucky still is, no friends that are just his and not Steve's, and that's even with his significantly lower standards for what constitutes a pal. That's even with the list Steve flourish-ishly presented him of Ways Bucky Can Live a Little Instead of Being a Friendless Loser, Dumbass.

Okay, so maybe Steve, shockingly, titled it a little more tactful than that, but Bucky knows how to read between the lines.

TGIF, 9:00 PM, woo-hoo and party time and et cetera, and he's not going on a walking tour of the Village, or attending a brew your own kombucha workshop, or even nervously hugging the bar at a dance club. He's in the safety of his own living room, reading between Steve's knees. Book club time. First, Steve rested his chin on the crown of Bucky's head, peering down as they both read in silence, but somewhere along the way, Bucky mouthing the words turned into reading fully aloud, and Steve's slumped back, knees tighter around Bucky's body, and the one time Bucky sneaked a glance behind him, the expression he saw was so happy and peaceful that he forgot for a moment how to read.

"...even more, um, unusual. Unusual. In that it is the only, uh—" And then like a tripwire interrupting a three-legged race at a birthday party, a whole different reason for forgetting how to read skips on in. "Jesus fucking christ, only species in its fucking family. Right. It has papery, bright—Okay. Fuck." He puts down the book, thinks better of it, finishes the sentence, then yeah, puts down the book.

Thing is, the last time Bucky had friends who were only his and not Steve's, they all died. 

Liebowitz took a bullet to the fucking throat. Kerry should've just lost a leg but it bled out too fast, all over Bucky's hands. Right in front of him, Bearfucker—after, Bucky'd tried calling him by his proper name out of respect, but it felt like the worst kind of rudeness—who'd promised to teach Bucky to tie a knot in a cherry stem with his tongue one day, turned to nothing but atoms in the air when a blue energy beam socked him in the chest. To say nothing of how they were the lucky ones, who weren't dragged away for the first round of tests at the factory.

And the only reason that Dum Dum and Jones and Jim and Monty and Dernier survived is that Steve came jogging in dressed up like Amelia Earheart fucked a Bomb Pop. Sweaty as a Bomb Pop melting in the July sun too, if the way Dum Dum told it was at all based in reality.

Anyway, at that point, they weren't Bucky's friends at all anymore, because there weren't any Bucky. Just a body on a table.

So maybe it's a touchier subject, maybe it's scarier than he's been letting on to Steve, letting him write that list, encouraging the jokey options like, "Start a community topiary garden." Maybe he should mention that the suggestion of, "Bridge club at the library" gave him a panic attack he had to bathe away for three hours because his good dead war buddy Bearfucker would talk about bridge plays to calm down in the midst of shelling.

Or maybe he should keep that battened down tight. Maybe he should never ever do anything to disturb that happy, goofy, peaceful look attached to the pair of knees holding him in their tender grip.

He knows that's not true. 

He blurts, "All my friends died." Waves the book. "You know. Fuck. Mass extinction, right?"

Steve says, "Oh." He says, "If you—We can read a different book."

"No, I wasn't—I like the book. It's not about the book. It's not helped by the book, I guess, but I like the book, so no. Shut up."

"Okay."

"Did we ever talk about that before?"

"No, Buck. But I assumed." He leans forward and brushes a lock of hair out of Bucky's face. It's down tonight, loose in an admittedly frizzy cloud, fucked to hell from the updo he tortured it into for work. Convenient curtain to hide behind, except that when he ducks his head, Steve says, "Can I get on the floor with you?"

"'May I,"' Bucky mutters, and Steve lets him get away with it. Which isn't really what Bucky needs right now. Though maybe it's what Steve needs.

"I'm real rude. If that wasn't a yes, punch me."

"Punch you? Yeesh, Bucky's broken, cue the drama. Someone doth protest too much that he don't like getting punched."

"That's just you. I promise." And he's on the floor, kneeled in front of Bucky, neck crooked so he can see up through the half-drawn curtain of hair. "Hey, bud."

"Hey, friend-o."

"Uh-huh. There we go. That's one friend who's alive."

"You _know _you don't count," Bucky says after laughing. "Sorry, but you're a category all its own."

"I know." He takes Bucky's hand and squeezes. _Pressure detected. _"Sorry." It's up in the air whether he means _for joking around _or _for your loss_; not like either's necessary, but not that they're not both nice to hear. 

Three-hundred beats of Steve's slow heart before Bucky manages to shove a, "Thank you," out his suddenly too-dry lips.

Steve says, "Mm." And, after a pause, "What do you want?"

Bucky's mouth twists. When Steve calls him a crybaby, it's never just making fun; he is, he knows, and always has been. But turning the friend problem over and over in his head these past weeks, he's found himself all stoppered up. Tears congeal into a fist in his throat but never work their way up into and exiting his eyes. But there's always the option to ask, "Make me cry?"

Steve's warm whisper is immediate. "You know that's not exactly a hardship for me. No need to be all shy about letting me blow off steam on you." He pushes hair out of Bucky's face, tucks it behind his ear. Too much to fit; a few strands scurry back to where they were, and Steve tuts. "You better be more obedient than your hair." His voice is too sweet still, a kid glove voice, but it's clear from his deepening breaths that he'll get himself to the other place soon enough.

Disobedient strands of hair cling to Bucky's smile. "I'll do my best."

"Oh, like that's saying much."

Eyes nearly squeezing shut, Bucky can't help the grin that grows—slow, like any growing thing—on his face, and Steve's own eyes are nearly shut too, slits but obviously tracking the grin's growth. Studying his mouth like they're sixteen and gearing up to properly kiss. But like they're eighteen, instead of a kiss, Steve meets his grin where it's at with an open-palmed smack hard enough to turn Bucky's head.

The _crack _rings in his ears, mingling with a radio-static rush of blood. More obedient than his hair, he keeps his head where Steve's hand left it. Mild as a Marlboro, Steve says, "I'm not looking for smiles out of you. Now. Are you going to be good and cry for me?"

Bucky hesitates. Another smack turns his head back to neutral. Burns him up, face and everywhere. Like maybe yeah, he's not obedient enough to stay where he's put, Steve's whole big hand settles under his jaw, thumb hard as nails on one side and same with the pointer and middle on the other. His hand's heel exerts enough pressure against Bucky's Adam's apple to scrawl the word _choked _across the inside of his skull even as the shaky breath he takes fills his lungs to the top.

"Let's try that again. Are you going to be good?"

Not expecting the punctuation's early arrival, Bucky scrambles to cover for his hesitation; he wasn't hesitating; he just didn't want to interrupt, but Steve's got no similar qualms, cutting off, Bucky's, "Probab—" by grabbing his hair close to the roots and yanking back. Abruptly, Bucky's reminded that he has a dick, hello, and the heel of Steve's hand presses in harder, lower, so for a moment Bucky really does imagine his breath is cut off, and his eyes bug out, and he sputters, surprised by the sharp whine that shoots from his lips.

Surprised by how he can, in fact, still take a deep breath. When he does, Steve lets go, at the jaw and the hair. His windpipe feels bruised, in a ghostly way. He doesn't speak, knowing he missed the boat on that. The corner of Steve's mouth twitches. His eyes go soft with pity, and he brushes a gentle thumb over Bucky's cheekbone, gentling his voice too, like anyone would ever fall for that. "I'm not fucking around here, Buck. I'm not interested in playing games. You have one more chance to answer me _on time _or I'm going to make you regret it."

A small part of Bucky recognizes the offer, but the majority of him knows that failing even one more time would probably break him to tears on its own. Whatever harsh punishment Steve's turning over in his head would be superfluous. And despite knowing that, the majority of him wants to be good.

Steve is generous. Steve gives him another chance. "Now. Are you going to be good?"

"Probably not. I don't know how to be."

"That's right. But are you going to cry for me."

The verbal affirmation he tries fails to contain sound, so he nods fast before trying again, "Yeah," creaky as if Steve's barely-there pressure on his throat really did bruise him five ways to next Friday. From ghostliness to utter, inescapable corporeality.

"Correct." He boops Bucky's nose, and that's enough to pull Bucky back from the edge, even if he manages to restrain himself from rolling his eyes. "Finally. You're lucky I'm so patient."

"I am."

Steve licks his lips, eyes on Bucky's, and this time, he retains the sixteen-year-old-ness of the gesture. Leans in and kisses Bucky not without some awkwardness, moving between soft pressure and chapped-rough scrape, his nose sharp against Bucky's, and Bucky holds himself still for it, letting Steve do whatever he wants. Even when soft turns to rough turns all the way to a sudden, hard bite encompassing Bucky's whole mouth, and Bucky tries to scream a curse but Steve swallows it up. Bucky's mouth throbs loud and hot with blood when Steve pulls away. His dick twitches. When he darts his eyes down, he sees the crotch of his sweats tenting, and swallows like someone screamed into _his _mouth. His mouth which feels fucking enormous, swollen as if with venom.

The edges of his eyes sting wetly, which is fine. Even if it's visible, Steve will know without asking that that's not nearly close to the kind of crying Bucky asked for.

Steve says, "You know what I'm going to do to you?"

Bucky shakes his head, because nothing's ever purely rhetorical.

"You'll know in a moment, darlingheart."

"Ugh, _Steve_."

"What, angel pie?" Bucky frowns at him, glaring from beneath a furrowed brow. He likes to think his eyes are shooting Nerf foam bullets, not enough to harm Steve, but enough to say, _Knock it off, dumbass_. As if Steve's ever been discouraged by even bullets made of lead. "Apple of my eye. Prettiest guy I've ever seen. My angel, really—"

"_Steven_."

"Yeah, handsome?"

Bucky grits his teeth and forces out, "Shut up," face warm.

In a second, his face is warmer, his ears full of the crack of Steve's heavy hand. Steve says, "Yeah, that's not something you say to me right now. Wanna apologize?" But Bucky just looks at him, shakes his head minutely, and licks his lower lip like it's bleeding, like he's _asking _for it to bleed, and so:

Each slap wakes him up to the reality of bone, how his face is solid, how he has structure. And along his soft bits, a simmering fire's sparked. A burn remains between harsh touches, the second, the third, through the sixth, all one side to leave the other wanting, and then a moment of no touch. Only the lingering heat. Until a pinch, big bunch of flesh between two calloused fingers, a pain like a parachute. Dull and round and keeping him from plummeting, carrying him to the literally articulated, "Oof,"of landing, fingers folding in and sharp nails digging like he's sand and someone's gotta be buried.

That _oof _is followed by an, "Ah," and then, "Oh, ah, uh, Steve," just to feel Steve's nails drag along his moving face. But the words move him too much, causing Steve's fingers to slip away, and immediately, he's scolded with another smack, the hardest so far. The impact against his jaw rings through him, and he hasn't, but he feels like he's bitten the inside of his cheek. Only deeper. Bitten through his bones with teeth made of chisels. Going exploring. It's so good and so grounding. Steve keeps him on the ground _so good._

Steve catches his nose between two knuckles, and with a squeeze, says, "I didn't ask to hear your nonsense." His tone is, in fact, no-nonsense.

"I'm sorry," Bucky says, and his squeezed nose makes him sound like he huffed helium. Which makes Steve laugh, which makes Bucky want to make him laugh more. So he crosses his eyes and sticks out his tongue, and does earn a pleased little laugh-huff, a half-grin.

"Are you apologizing for the noise or for telling me to shut up?"

"Uh. Just for the noise."

Steve sighs. "Okay, stupid. Kitchen. Now." But he doesn't let go of Bucky's nose. Stands, in fact, without his knuckles budging an inch, leaving him stooped in the manner of a hungry giant getting close to examine the boy who's climbed a beanstalk into his lair. A magnifying glass should float in the air between them.

_Well, are you coming? _Steve's eyebrows ask, and Bucky helium-voices, "Yeahyesokay."

"No shit, 'okay.' Stop wasting my time." The knuckles tighten, and though Bucky calibrates his motions, in standing, to limit their dislodging, they slip on his skin's oil and sweat. One would head up his nasal passage and into his brain were Steve's fingers any smaller than sticks of dynamite. As it is, his air's just cut off that way more effectively. He hears a little _pop _inside his skull like mucus displaced. His lips part further.

Vertical, eye-to-Steve's-pretty-eyes, but still feeling like Jack who climbed too high, he repeats, "Sorry," a guttural noise.

"But still not for telling me to shut up."

"Guess not."

"What was that? Gay snot?"

"Yer immacher._"_

"And you're not going to the kitchen. Which is worse?"

Bucky nods, and the second knuckle slips down too, its smooth inner skin blocking the way into his nose's other hole. Steve pushes like a slow punch, really battening down the hatches. No one and nothing's gonna get up into Bucky's brain nasalwise. He sucks a harsh breath through his nose just to feel the stoppering, the hopelessness of that breath, which does hit him like a punch between the eyes, and he gasps, mouthwise, like a bathtub beginning to drain, followed by a very human noise. The noise people make upon waking from nightmares.

Steve lets his nose go. He comes as close to punching Bucky in the face as he ever gets, sharp rap of knuckles on cheekbone, nothing bruiseable. Then he kisses the spot, and he takes Bucky by the hand when his lips are still on his skin, and tugs him kitchenward. Behind him, Bucky follows like a ship's wake. All ripply and wet, but aimed true. 

His dumb buoyant rudder-having husband sighs theatrically in front of him. "Can't believe I have to help you with something so simple. Thought you knew your way around the place by now."

"I get lost."

"Do you ever. Couldn't find your way out of a Tupperware if I superglued a compass to the back of your hand."

"I have questions about this scenario."

"Too bad." Steve turns, grip still sure. He's grinning in the way anyone else might call _grim _instead of the more accurate _plotting_. "You're not allowed to question me right now." Punctuation: one harder tug, and, "In," so Bucky trips into the kitchen, banging his shin on the table leg. He whimpers at the instant throb, eyes falling closed. "Aw, honey. You want me to kiss that better?"

"No."

"Too bad." They hold hands as Steve crouches down, pushing the leg of Bucky's jeans up. His lips are hot against skin that willprobably bruise the way his cheek won't. A gentle kiss becomes a hard suck, wracking Bucky with shivers. Steve pulls away, pats the spot firmly, and disconcertingly does not push the leg of Bucky's jeans back down. The ankle cuff digs into the meat of his calf.

"Thanks, I guess," Bucky says and Steve just hums, standing.

"Everything's a guess with you. On the island. Up, up." So far, the new island's held up admirably to the amount of fucking and fucking around it's been subjected to. It holds him well when he climbs aboard, Steve's hand still in his, like Steve's helping him onto the back of a horse. "Flat on your back. Your eyes don't leave the ceiling."

"Steve."

"Yeah?"

"Ceiling's up there. My eyes are in my head."

"Jesus fucking," isn't enough to hide how Steve snorts, but he quickly moves onto, "Now. Let's deal with _this_." Calloused fingers grip the point of Bucky's tongue and yank it out of his mouth, holding it hostage. The moment stretches, Steve's eyebrows tangling like one insulted the other's honor, and Bucky's brows follow suit.

Bucky says, "Mm?"

Steve clears his throat, looking embarrassed. "No binder clips in here. Inconsiderate of you not to keep scripts in the kitchen."

The corners of Bucky's mouth draw up until he probably looks like a playful emoji, with circle eyes and its tongue hanging out. Steve sighs and lets go of Bucky's tongue, apparently giving up, but the moment he's got control of all his mouth parts again, Bucky says, "Bag clips in the drawer."

Steve squints at him, "What's a backlip?"

"_Bag. _Like chip bag. _Clips _for _chips. _I know you've eaten chips before."

"Oh boy," Steve says. "You _really _need a lesson, huh? Now tell me again, but enunciate like a good little idiot. Fucking backlip. You're _giving _me back-lip."

"Sorry. There are chip! Bag! Clips, in the drawer, Steve, sweetheart."

"There are, aren't there?" He kisses Bucky's forehead. "Adequate boy, helping me shut him up when he's being too mouthy." Bucky squirms, but he's still smiling, a simpler emoji now. Dots and a curve, no playing. Then Steve's hand slips from his. His face falls out of view and his body heat moves away. Objects clanging and shuffling. The slam of a drawer, Steve's hip against the drawer's edge visible out of the corner of Bucky's eye even as he obediently stays facing the ceiling.

A stupid beautiful face like a pile of pick-up sticks interrupts his ceiling-gazing. The face's stupid enormous hands hover over him too, a wide holographic purple clip in one, its Ruffle-ridged springy mouth open, ready to reprimand. "This okay?" Steve asks, like Bucky wasn't the one who suggested it.

Bucky demonstrates his feelings by making no facial expression at all.

Steve huffs. "Humor me and answer, asshole."

"Okay. Please. Please make me regret mouthing off?"

"There we go. Show me."

He sticks his tongue out far as it will go. Receives the clip clamping down with the receptiveness of a dog gifted a rawhide**.** Tapping the handle of the clip so it bounces Bucky's tongue, Steve says, "I'm gonna be real benevolent and give you permission to take this off whenever you like. Got it?"

Thumbs up emoji, but rendered in three-dimensional metal.

"Thank you. Now. Where were we? What oughta I be doing to you?"

The long pause says that's a real question mark, so Bucky's three-dimensional metal emoji hand snakes underneath his own ass and grips hard. He knows what he wants. He raises his hips off the table to better maneuver. With each tiniest movement, the clip shakes, like his tongue's shimmying its hips on a dance floor.

"Hmm? I don't understand, Buck. Give me a better demonstration." When Bucky takes too long to process what that means, Steve sighs long-suffering and twirls his finger in the air. "Give us a spin, sweetheart."

Swallowing, Bucky levers himself onto his front, turning his head to the side so as not to crush his exposed and clipped tongue to death. Raises his hips again for a different purpose this time, making a clear and rounded target, and smacks himself on the ass as hard as he can. Still left-handed, because he almost never gets permission to slap himself in the face left-handed, but they know from experience how much more abuse his ass can take. His ass takes it well, tugging the solid pain deep into muscle like a giant squid tugging a sunken ship into the deep.

"Ohhh," Steve says. "I see. Is that really what you want?"

His tongue's predicament distorts his loud assent. His jeans do less to distort the sharp smack of his hand coming down a second time, on the other side. Drool drips off his tongue and onto the counter. 

Steve grabs that hand before it can go anywhere else, hard pressure around the wrist, and he pins it to the small of Bucky's back. "Do that again and I'm gonna get the impression you think I can't do my job right. This is mine to hurt." He squeezes one cheek of Bucky's ass, brightening the sting. "Behave. Let me do my job." The parting squeeze to Bucky's wrist communicates loudly that part of behaving is keeping it there. The other hand is allowed to lie by his head on the counter, the hand that'll remove the clip if necessary. Won't be necessary.

Then Steve's lifting Bucky's legs with one hand around both ankles, swiveling them off the island like Bucky's a windshield wiper. Until there's enough space for him to hop up onto the island himself, and then he swings Bucky's wiper legs back in place, and tugs, until Bucky's settled firmly over his lap, ass centered just so.

One fever-hot hand shoves its way under his hips, thumbing the button of his jeans open with ease, dragging down the zipper. Steve's other hand yanks the jeans down in one sure motion. They're loose, the kind of jeans great for concealing knives, but they've been home all day and the only knives on him are tucked safely in his boots, which stop the jeans from slipping to the floor with a jangle of zipper, coins, and keys; they scrunch up at his ankles, binding him. His breath catches as he waits for his underwear to follow suit.

His breath could be waiting for a long time if he weren't a merciful man. Because Steve's the most perfect merciless man, forgoing the embarrassment of a full-on bare-ass spanking in favor of a greater humiliation. Each thumb hooks beneath one leg of Bucky's briefs and he draws them up, up, shoving as much material between his cheeks as will fit.

Which isn't all _that _much, but the cotton rubs against his hole and pulls tight and confining over his hardening dick and a whine slips free before Bucky can say much about it. And he's got no choice but to squeeze his eyes shut, to project onto the dark screen of his eyelids how the top bit of his ass is still covered by rucked-up neon orange, and how the roundest and most sensitive bits beneath that, pale and unmarked, are all ready for Steve's heavy hand to set him straight. To send him straight to tears. More drool drops from his tongue like rainwater from a gutter, sliding down his arm. 

"There we go," Steve says, with a pat right over the cloth wedged in the crack of Bucky's ass so that blood pulses in Bucky's groin and his eyelids flutter, "All ready for me, huh?" Bucky hums assent. A ragged fingernail claws an arc beneath one rucked brief leg, sting singing in its wake, and then they're off to the races.

Steve's hand does to Bucky's ass what it did to his face, plus a billion and one. Hits fall harder, hurt more real estate. His ass is a forest catching fire, mirage-wavy crackling heat spreading from the rounded middle of his ass to the tops of his thighs, and then back up, jumpy, hungry.

There's no rhythm to it, just how there's no rhythm to Steve's dancing but there's always still intent, and Bucky pictures—when he isn't picturing blazing bright light or rumpled neon orange or how dark crimson his ass must be getting down and to the right, where Steve keeps cracking his hand against the sensitive land of ass and thigh becoming one another—that maddeningly focused _look _that's set up camp on Steve's face the few times Bucky's convinced him onto a real dance floor or just to dance on their living room floor, jaw clenched hard and eyes like they're literally tearing through an instruction manual. Ripping it in half with their little eye-teeth. That look aimed relentlessly at Bucky's squirming, reddening lower half, focused not on moving but on making_ Bucky _move.

And god, he does move, bucks, writhes like a worm—Abandon All Dignity, Ye Who Enter Steve's Care. He tries pulling his tongue in to drink his saliva, so thirsty already, drool pooling on the counter. The clip fits halfway in his mouth. What began as a dull ache in his tongue has turned into a persistent burn, an awareness of each and every holographic tooth. Steve says, "Uh, uh," and pulls his tongue back out of his mouth, so Bucky whines, but he's good and keeps his tongue where Steve leaves it.

His dick ruts against Steve's thigh, but the uncomplicated pleasure that should zip through him with each thrust is drowned by heat, by how rough his shirt feels against his nipples, and no one's even laid a hand on him there. They're just lit up the way every nerve ending is lit up. Little laughs escape him the way tears should. The cloth packed in tight against his hole shifts in increments as little as his laughs, and its presence is reassuring, like a hand on the back of the neck. A handful of little laughs all glob up together and come out a gargled wet sound.

Then, heralded by an especially loud series of smacks to his upper thighs like swelling music as the hero kisses the rescued princess: Intermission.

Quiet and peace. They both just breathe for a moment, the loudest thing in the room. Steve's hand strokes up his back, beneath the shirt, hot from hurting him. "Want I should take off my belt, mister? I can if you haven't had enough."

And his eyes are damp but it's not the same as what he needs. There's still the clogged-pipe feeling in his throat, so yeah, he removes the bag clip from his tongue and works past the sharpness of blood flooding back in to get out a rickety, "Yes. Little—please—more, lower down. Um. Thighs." He keeps the clip clenched in his hand.

"Yeah, we can do that. So hungry for it, aren't you?" He rakes his nails down Bucky's thigh and then lays a hard smack over the clawed trail. "Got you all sweaty and red-faced and disgusting and you're still begging me for more. What am I gonna do with you?"

"Anything, anything. Please—" He's immediately gagged by two fingers, and sucks for all he's worth.

"Hmm. Stand up. Facing me"

For a long minute, he's just standing there, pants down, smarting ass on display to all the kitchen appliances, dick straining against the front of his briefs, while Steve studies him. Drinks him in. And then Steve decides, "You should drink some water." But he's slow about passing behind Bucky, toward the glasses and sink. Leisurely about filling one up.

If Bucky weren't who he is, he wouldn't be able to say with a million percent certainty when someone's studyinghim from behind, but he's more or less got eyes in the back of his head, and he knows Steve's eyes are on his reddened ass framed in neon, on his pinked up thighs that could use some bruises. Steve's getting the lay of the land from a new perspective. Gone up in a helicopter to sketch the topography.

When he does return and push the cool, perspiring glass into Bucky's hand with a curt, "All of it," he sets about a new project: pinching Bucky all over. Which encourages Bucky to drink slower than he might otherwise have, which was maybe Steve's grand plan to stop him from cramping with a rush of icy water to the gut. Strategic asshole.

Sharp, raggedy nails roam his body, on the tips of fingers like bag clips, springy and harsh. One hand trails up his inner thighs, making regular pinching pitstops, while the other leaps around from perch to perch on his stomach and hips. Together, they send splinters of terrified joy through him. Get his hips bucking, and drag whimpers and gasps from between his lips. Fingers find the fat of his upper arm, find the webbing between his fingers, find the flesh behind his ear, like a piercing gun slipped.

Both hands worm together under his shirt to get his nipples, already stiff and edging into sore, and that's the brightest, biggest shock. Bucks his hips the most. Trying desperately to get off against the air, he's squirmy in no one's grasp. Just Steve's infuriating thrall. His left nipple's left alone for a second, only so Steve can torture his inner thighs again. Working over flesh that's been plenty sensitized, plucking it even brighter and sharper. 

Then both nipples are between his fingers again, only they hold him loosely. Clamps yet to be tightened. Sounding giddy, almost out of breath, Steve whispers in his ear, "You ready?" like they're about to jump out of an airplane together.

"Probably not."

"Yeah. Good answer." Those fleshy clamps tighten and _twist _in opposite directions, then twist the nipples toward each other. The edges of his fingernails press right into the center, like pushing away rose petals to get to the pollen, and he flicks at the hardened buds of them and—

"Steve, _Steve_." He hears wetness in his voice. His eyes are only a little leaking. "I'll, break the glass, I'll—" Whether he means from dropping it or clutching too hard he's not sure—"I might—"

"You better not. Put it down." Bucky takes a long slug first so that he's obeying the initial command, then stretches forward to obey the second.

"But also I'll come, okay, I'll—"

"Really? Nothing's touching your stupid dick."

"Yeah. Maybe anyway. It's—"

"You asking me to or to not?"

"Whichever. It's up to you, Steve."

"Hmm. It is, isn't it? Good answer, fuckhole." He palms Bucky's ass with both hands, and the lightest contact between his nipples and his shirt makes him keen, though that could also be the big meaty paws kneading at his beaten ass.

"It was a shitty answer."

"It was whatever I say it was. Yeah, you're gonna come, I think. I'll even be nice about it." He tucks himself in right up close behind Bucky, so his thigh's a median between the two roadways of Bucky's asscheeks. Hard muscle firmly pressing cotton even more surely against his hole, and denim like sandpaper against the sore flesh on the more inner bits of his ass. Steve's stockingfoot gently shoves its way between Bucky's boots. Bucky tries to painlessly squeeze that foot with his boots in a kind of hug.

One arm comes up to wrap around his stomach, pulling him back tight into Steve's bulk, hand landing possessively on one of his pinched-up hips. The free Steve-hand reaches into his briefs and pushes them down enough to show off the head of his dick. Steve hooks his chin over Bucky's shoulder, getting a good look, and says, "Oh, cute."

"Ugh."

"About as cute as a cartoon snail."

"Those _are _cute."

"I still don't think it's a compliment."

"Whatever. Get me off, please."

"Ask nicer." Steve's hand makes a big show of moving away from his dick.

"I said _please_. _Steve_." This alone might make him cry, but Steve promised his belt, and he has to hold out.

"I don't care. I said nicer."

"Please, pretty goddamn please, dearest, most beloved Steven, wilst thoust consider, perhaps, being so kind, so generous, as to—"

Steve's giggling when his hand clamps down over Bucky's mouth, gagging him. "Where's a genie when you need one? I have three wishes I wanna make and they're all about you shutting up."

Bucky smacks a kiss to the palm. Instead of a reciprocal smack to the face, that gets him another good wallop to the side of his ass, more painful now for the reprieve, a taste of how the belt might feel.

Steve's hand cups the head of his dick how it cupped his mouth. Silencing it. He rotates his wrist, the callouses and the tender inside of his palm alternating sliding over him, strange and insufficient and rumbling little shocks of pleasure through him. "_Please_," Bucky keens, a broken record.

"Hmm? Oh, you want—" Steve takes his hand away completely. Bucky's hands make frustrated fists at his sides, and Steve curls his cruelly snatched-away hand into a fist of his own, but looser, floating in the air in front of them. And shakes it up and down in a jerk-off motion. "That?"

Bucky starts to say, _No shit_, but thinks better of it. He's being as good as he ever is. "If you think I deserve it."

"Eh. You probably don't. But I'm merciful." He is. Not letter-of-the-law true to the implication of his pantomime, but in the spirit of the law, he's merciful, rubbing his open palm up and down over the bulging front of Bucky's underwear. "There we go. Wow, what a big boy."  
  
"Steve! That's w—fuck, weird."

"Ohhh nooo," Steve deadpans. "What a big, okay boy. Dripping all over the place. You can't help yourself, can you? Oughta plug this thing up. Maybe cut some ginger smaller. Surprised you don't leave a mess everywhere you go, how wet you get."

Like its ears are burning—he knows his own ears are—his dick splurts out more pre-come, which slips down to join the growing wet patch at the front of his briefs. "Like—You said cartoon snail. It's the—"

"Slime trail?"

"Yeah."

"Exactly. Surprised you don't leave a trail of slime everywhere you go, you disgusting little thing." His hand picks up speed. Bucky's whole lower half feels like it's made of plucked guitar strings and the song's reaching a crescendo. "You close?"

"I'm—" He nods instead of trying to say words, knowing they'll come out embarrassing animal noises.

"Words," Steve says, because he must know the same thing.

"Mmph. Yes, I'm—"

"Too bad." Steve takes his hand away. The guitar strings all snap, leaving reverberating silence. Bucky's left hand, still in a fist at his side, slams against his own thigh like it's throwing a tantrum over wanting sugar cereal and his leg's the floor of a supermarket.

"No!"

"Yep."

"You said I wouid come."

"And? Maybe I lied. You shouldn't be so trusting, Buck."

"I'm not."

"Aww. Did I hurt your feelings? Bend over, little trust-slut." He propels him with one hand between the shoulder blades and another slapping his thighs, two quick smacks to each. The island feels so cool against his blushing cheek, so smooth against his tortured nipples, even through his shirt. His hands press flat to its expanse, on either side of his head. Finally, there it is:

The whisper of Steve's belt freed from its caging loops.

"Thank you," Bucky says, the offense against his needy dick already fading into the background, and Steve's voice is crackling campfire warmth, the way he says, "Of course, Buck. Anything," as he smooths a hand down Bucky's thigh, soothing him, and only then does Bucky realize he's shaking. The faintest tremor, but nothing that would ever escape Steve's watchful eye. 

More soothing arrives in the form of an encore: an additional two smacks to each thigh, hot and bright, deepening the pain from the previous duo. Pinking him up in preparation. A _snap _loud in his ear, Steve cracking the belt to tease him. By the other ear too, and Steve says, "You sure you can take it?"

"What am I, a duckling?" Petulance commits breaking and entering under his very nose, his tongue and lips the crime scene. "I can _take _it."

Steve tuts. "Look enough like one. Small and weak. Always following me around."

"You calling yourself a mother duck?"

"Maybe."

"Got the beak for it. Eat enough bread crusts."

Steve laughs, and ruffles Bucky hair. "And you got all this nice soft down. So pretty."

"Please don't make me say shut up again."

"Why not? It'll only make me hurt you worse." He pauses. Snaps the belt in the air again almost idly, further from Bucky's ears this time.

Bucky swallows. "Yeah. Shut up, please, Steve."

"Aw." Return of the bag clip fingers, harsh at the back of his neck, forcing all his muscles tense like he's been shocked, like he's coming, and if _only_, his hard, denied dick smushed against the counter, helplessly held in place by his weight. "Let's see if I can make you regret that smart mouth."

"_Please_."

"Shush. Let me focus." Steve's focus burns; always does, eyes burning holes in him, but this time it burns because it's in the form of leather lashing down across both thighs at once. Bucky moans and goes up on tip-toe, wanting to pull his skin taut for maximum hurt, but Steve says, "No," and pushes him back down with a massive hand at the small of his back. "I decide how you feel, not you." The hand's there to stay. The belt hits him again, again, moving down towards the backs of his knees, a broad brush painting him barn-red. "You're not smart enough to decide things like that." Just above his knees and then back up, retracing its steps like searching for something lost.

Fast and sharp, counterbalanced by the steady broad hand still holding him down, like all things Steve gives him, it's more good than he can comprehend getting to have. Steve kicks at the inside of his ankle. Bucky obeys, spreading his legs as wide as he can while hobbled by his jeans. The tip of the belt tap taps at his inner thighs, already sensitive from all the pinching. "Please," Bucky whimpers.

"I said I decide. Not you. But maybe I'll be nice."

This _crack_ sounds softer than the lashes against the backs of his thighs, but the pain bursts louder, chasing a scream from him like Wile E. Coyote chasing the roadrunner off a cliff. Steve whips his inner thighs thoroughly, back and forth, moving up and down again, steady, unwavering no matter how much Bucky's soft screams waver, something like a clot beginning to travel up his throat, so so close and still not _there_. Still not leaving him be.

"Is it enough for you?" Steve asks, and it could be rhetorical, teasing, a _nothing's enough for you_ sort of thing, but that would be trueright now, so Bucky answers, "More, please, please," and Steve says, "I know. I got it," sounding like someone in whom anyone with any sense would place every ounce of trust they owned. Then his thumbs hook in either side of the briefs' waistband, and he's pulling them down, the sudden absence of pressure against Bucky's hole startling, unbalancing. 

Steve says, "Put your hands back and hold your ass open."

He gasps at his own fingertips against his abused ass, hisses when he digs in for a good grip, and gasps again when his hole's exposed to the cool air of the room. He can feel it twitch under Steve's scrutiny. 

Bucky's asked for this before, but never—

_Never_ stops existing when the tip of the belt whips down over his hole. And then before he can properly process the fiery sting of it, the almost-too-muchness of it, again, again a rush of wasp stings made flat—Could Steve whip him so much he swells shut?—and—

With a little scream, the stuck, rusty tap behind his eyes gives way, WD-40'd by teeth and leather, palm and nails, sweet words too big to carry around. "Fuck," Bucky gasps, the tip of the belt hitting him again, a snake bite, a lightning strike. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck," like this isn't what he wanted.

The belt stops. Clatters to the floor. Steve takes one look at Bucky's tear-tracked face and falls to his knees, hands covering Bucky's hands to gently pry them off his ass and let his cheeks conceal, protectively, the place where he's hurting most. Bucky's not too far gone not to wince at the way bone smacks loud against tile, but he is too far gone to hand out any soft, hypocritical admonishments about it.

He has no idea what Steve's down there for and it doesn't matter because his chest and throat are a conduit for every bad thing in him, full and wracked, his shoulders shaking, but okay, it _does _matter, how Steve's mouth presses an open-mouthed kiss to his ass, hot and wet, and then his teeth skate across that burning flesh, and then _clamp_. A harsh bite, a sucking thing, a second thing for him to be wracked with, wrecked with, and the sobs pitch upward. His eyes screw shut.

The whole world: this hurting, this wetness, this body, this kitchen, this Steve.

Steve finally lets go with a close-mouthed kiss, only to repeat the action on the other side, and Bucky is still stuck saying, "Fuck, fuck, fuck," but he thinks vaguely that a _Steve _or a _yes _or _help_ might sneak in there too. Maybe a _no_ but the kind Steve knows to ignore, with no _really _or _seriously _or anything similar appended, even if his voice is nothing but seriousness, the unsteady, liquid thing that all seriousness is.

Steve lets up. Stands up. Presses his thumbs into the bites for only a second before rubbing Bucky's back instead, up, down, brisk, rucking his shirt. 

"Hey, hey there, crybaby. Climb up on the counter for me. On your rear end, come on. Need you in pain a little longer. You're gonna come, okay?" 

Bucky's face gets somehow hotter at the sound of his own sniffling. "Okay." He gingerly climbs his way onto the island, its surface shockingly cool against his smarting ass and thighs, but a hard pressure too, so not a full relief. Snot slides down from his nose. Instead of laughing at him, Steve wipes it with his sleeve. "Jesus," Bucky says, wishing for a second face to hold all this heat, and moves to hide the one face he has got in his shoulder.

"Ah, ah," Steve corrects, a finger beneath Bucky's chin steering him back into visibility. "You know better. Lemme see." Bucky nods.

Steve's seeing is a group effort, nose and mouth alive with focus just as much as his eyes. And his shoulders, straining more than usual against his shirt, like Bucky's teary face has a gravitational pull made just for them. Those hold-up-the-world shoulders Bucky desperately wants to bite into, latching himself on like a leech: small, hungry, slimy, and useful (if you're a time traveler at least, and, well).

When he's seen to his satisfaction, Steve orders, "Get your hand on it." The second order, once Bucky's wrapped a fist around the shaft, that touch alone prompting him unconsciously to run his teeth over his tongue, poke his tongue into his cheek, and lower his eyelids, all in one quick choreography, is, "Do whatever you need to. Come on. I'm counting down in my head and you don't come before zero then you won't at all." Cooing now, "Come on, little crybaby. Little dumb slut. Do what you're made for."

It doesn't take much. Fast tugs at his dick, and Steve's mouth by his ear. Sometimes sucking on the lobe, and sometimes turning to lick up his tears, but mostly softly talking shit. "Finally, your little hole's hurting like it should, right? Like it deserves. Enough for you, honey? No, nothing is, right? So needy. The neediest little slut I've ever seen in my life," and, "God you look ugly right now. You should see how red you are. Can't tell your face from your ass," and, "Show me all that gross snail slime you got in you, huh?"

What tips him over the edge, into free-fall like a cartoon character just now noticing there's no ground beneath its feet: A twist of his hand right below the head, a thumb rubbing his gross snail slime around, and Steve's croon of, "God, I could survive on your tears alone. Beat you every day, put you to work bottling them up for me. Come on, cumrag. You wanna feed me?"

Falling, falling, the air a loud rush in his ears, and his tear-filled eyes squeezed shut in fear of the approaching ground.

True to _cumrag_, Steve catches all the cum in his hand and then smears it on Bucky's stomach. Kind enough to lift his shirt up and then off for that, so it doesn't become a wet and then crusty ruin. Only Bucky's body has to be a wet and crusty ruin, because that's what Steve's said it is. What it's made to be. His eyes certainly feel both wet and crusty. His whole face, skin tightening with drying tears. He hiccups, and glowers at the hiccup. Can't be very intimidating, because a second hiccup follows.

Steve makes claws with his hands and says, "Boo!" first backing away and then leaping toward Bucky, and Bucky breaks into peals of laughter, more than the dumb move deserves.

"I think I'm—" _Hiccup_—"hurting too much all—goddammit, already to tell you to—"

"I said _boo_! Stop hiccuping!" 

"_—shut up _again, but know that, y'know, in my head—"

"Thoughtcrimes are still crimes," Steve says haughtily. "But I'll let it go this once." Between damp-lashed blinks, haughtiness becomes honeyed concern. "Hey there, buddy." He tucks Bucky's hair behind his ears, both sides. "That what you needed?"

Bucky's mouth feels small. He nods, eyes dropping to his bare knees. A few tears drop there, and he smears them into the skin with his thumb. A long inhale through his nose, grossly loud with snot. "Thank you."

"Told you," and the teasing tone makes Bucky look back up at him, "not exactly a hardship."

"Lemme be fucking grateful."

"All right. Let's both be."

"Ugh."

"Oh you're allowed and I'm not?"

"Yes. Exactly. Glad you understand."

Steve huffs. "You don't decide what's allowed, thank god." He flicks the bulb of Bucky's nose, and picks up the abandoned water glass. "You're going to drink more water. And then you're going to take a nap. That sound right?"

"Yeah, Steve. Sounds right."

It's only through Steve's superhuman reflexes that the glass doesn't smash open on the floor when Bucky nods off mid-drink.

  


"Hey, sleepyhead," is the second thing he hears when he comes back to consciousness. The first is Steve closing the icebox door. "You took that well."

"Mm. Thanks. You too," he adds nonsensically. A quilt's been thrown over his body, and he pushes it off, sitting up.

"You want a reward?"

"Do I deserve a reward?"

Steve raises his eyebrows. "If I offer you a reward, you deserve it. Now shut up and take it."

"I can't until you _give _it to me."

Steve sighs. He smacks Bucky in the mouth not as hard as he could, which means it's probably not the reward, but Bucky asks anyway, "That it?"

"Learn some patience." His big hand strokes over Bucky's mouth, and turns from soothing to shushing as all fingers but the pointer fold down. "Give me a second. Close your eyes."

Bucky obeys, but, "Might fall back asleep, I do that." His lower lip's dry, catching at Steve's skin when it moves against his finger with the words. Or maybe Steve's hand's dry, or they're both the desert.

"Then I'll wake you up again."

"I kinda gotta piss. Can I just do that and come back for the surprise?"

"You know what? Yes. Go empty that little bladder for me."

"Gross, Steven."

"You've pissed in a mug for me before. Grow up."

"Ugh. I forgot about that."

"Go. Piss in the toilet like a civilized person."

Bucky gives him a little salute. He'd stay and take off his boots, free his underwear and jeans for removal too, but that wouldn't be especially obedient when Steve's said to go, so he waddles, rewarded by the snickering Steve does in his wake.

His hands are clean but the water's still running, his eyes stuck on the mess of themselves. Stubbornly damp, puffy around the edges, and red as his ass must be. Which, right. He grabs up the hand mirror and holds it behind him, neck complaining as he stares over his shoulder. More than red—He's purple in places, which can't be said for his eyes. Darkest where Steve's mouth brutalized him, but definitely welting, too, on his thighs. Some parts are only the pink of fresh-fallen gingko berries, but he's right that most are eye-red. Overnight flight red that whitens when he briefly sinks his fingers in with a hiss. All of it's stark against the pale, untouched very top.

When he pulls one cheek to the side, he sees his hole is red and puffy, and shivers at the sight. It would hurt so much if Steve fucked him now. With IcyHot as lube, maybe. With something wooden and unrelenting.

He lets go, the relief of no longer gripping his sore flesh balanced by how it hurts more for that flesh to cover his sore hole. He pulls out his phone and poses for a picture. And finally, finally takes off his boots and jeans and underwear. It's tempting to pull his pants up instead for the pain of it. But what kind of expression of generosity would that be for Steve? Steve loves to see his own art.

That much is clear when Bucky returns to see Steve set up a piece of installation art in his absence. And is hovering near it, arms crossed over his chest, lips pursed, considering. When Bucky walks in, Steve's eyes cut to him, one eyebrow raising, as if to ask for a review, then raising higher when he registers Bucky's nudity, his floppy dick and the stomach he's wiped clean of come but couldn't wipe clean of little bruises from big pinchy fingers.

Bucky steps closer to properly examine the installation. To give the most accurate critical take.

A red and white gingham blanket's stretched between the seats of three kitchen chairs arranged in a close-knit triangle.Two chairs with a neat blanket corner weighted beneath a stack of cookbooks, and the third chair with what was left of the blanket's edges sort of wadded up, trapped beneath cookbooks too. In the suspended middle sits a pie the size of Bucky's fist, cradled by a pie tin silver as his fist too. An extra bit of crust's been cut into a star and layered atop the rest, perfectly centered, and the whole dome of it glistens like a certain unnamed someone brushed it with an egg wash, so attentive to detail.

And on the floor, where it would make sense for a fourth chair to be, because blankets have four corners, Steven,is an arrow made of duct tape, pointing at the hovering blanket, and a paper sign that announces, "FREE PIE!!!"

It would be so easy for Bucky to reach forward, grab the pie, and move on with his night. But of course, instead, he steps onto the arrow, standing in the wide open entrance to the blanket, and reaches forward and grabs his pie, but without straightening up, fully unnecessarily lifts his leg and steps onto the blanket. It falls. He lets himself fall with it. The pie stays safe in his hand. A couple cookbooks fall into the space between chairs with him and the blanket too, and Steve's laughter falls out his mouth, finally. Bucky's too. Nothing straight-faced about this operation.

Steve comes to loom over him. "Hmm. Catch of the day."

Bucky grins. "Yeah, you got me."

"A hole _inside_ a hole. Now that's something special."

Cheeks flushing hot as his other cheeks still are, he corrects, "I got two holes."

"You _have _two holes. You _are _one hole. And so is this. Isn't math fun?" God.

"_Steve_."

"At least the hole you're in isn't filthy as you. I just laundered that blanket."

"But now it's on the floor."

"And I just washed the floor."

"But now it's touching _me."_

"That's true. Shoulda washed you, huh? Should've given you a bath, soaped your mouth, cleaned you out at both ends?"

Bucky shrugs. "Guess that's what the washing machine's for."

"For. You?"

"What?" His cackling manages to clear out long enough for him to manage, "No! For the blanket, dummy, now that I've been on it. Christ."

"Excuse me!"

"Nice thought, though."

"It is. You'd get thrown around so _much_."

"That what you're gonna do with me now that I'm in here? Throw me around?"

"Not that it's not tempting. But there's not exactly much room. I was thinking—Hey!"

Bucky's lunged toward freedom, a real wannabe Houdini, free hand scrabbling at the chairs while the other holds the pie safely close to his chest, and Steve's hands land on his ribs, shoving him back down, then tickling, yanking big belly laughs out of him, interspersed with high giggles like a sinister elf. "Fuck, fuck, mercy!" Bucky shouts, and Steve gets in a jab in the side and then relents.

"Stay," he says, and runs to the island and back to get the enormous abandoned quilt, throwing it over the whole set-up, shrouding Bucky and the pie in safe darkness. He didn't say _wait_, but Bucky wants Steve to see him taste the pie, so he just looks down at it, traces the star with one fingertip on the end of a starry arm.

The icebox opens, closes, and the edge of the quilt lifts. In comes Steve, despite the closeness of these quarters, another teensy pie in his hand. "This seat taken?"

"For you? Oh, I'd have to think about that one a bit."

"Too bad." He sits with crossed legs as Bucky pulls his own legs in to match. Their knees overlap. The small space smells like peaches and pastry, with an undercurrent of sweat so they don't forget what they were up to only an hour before. "Go on, taste what you got captured for. Tell me if it was worth it."

It would be worth it even if the pie tasted like literal shit, obviously.

With one finger, he pries the crust's edge free of its silver prison. "Why did you make the world's smallest fucking pie?" he asks, like he has any hope of keeping the dizzy-hearted gratitude locked up in his mouth instead of sauntering around his words. A big bite of pie distorts the tacked-on, "Lazy."

"I figured, you have the world's smallest brain. It's thematic."

He holds a hand over his mouth so no food goes flying—he's not losing any crumb of this pie—and lowers all fingers but the middle. "You're the worst."

"I try."

"You excel."

"Hey, there's a thought. We already brought PowerPoint into the bedroom."

"Living room." Steve doesn't even pinch him or anything, speeding past the correction without a backward glance.

"Do you want to talk about it more?" He still hasn't touched his own pie. A shame. It tastes like sugar and sunshine. Sugar baked on the sun's surface. 

"I dunno. I know—God, all your friends died too. Right?"

"Eventually, sure. It's not the same thing."

"Steve, come on, y—"

"It still sucks. But it's not the same thing."

"I just. Feel like I'm a bad luck charm."

"Not mine."

"You don't know that."

"Hey." Steve's voice is sharp, but he's gentler than he was earlier about using Bucky's hair to manhandle him, to turn his head so they're facing each other. "Yes, I fucking do, Buck. Don't fucking contradict me."

"Okay," Bucky says into his almost-empty his pie tin. His intent to savor didn't so much pan out. But that's fine. There can be more pie. Piles more pie. California peaches will be in season a little longer, and the gas bill for the oven will always be paid. "I'm your good luck charm. Fine."

"Well, I didn't say _that_. You're just Bucky. No luck, good or bad. You're you and you're mine. That's enough. Now. You gonna finish that?"

"You haven't even started yours," Bucky whines as he shoves the last bit of pie into his mouth, and Steve is tractable, finally dumping his own pie into one massive paw and stuffing it whole into his maw. His eyes study Bucky's face, an open-ended prompt.

Bucky shrugs. Swallows. Bits of peach stick between his teeth and he saves them for later. "I had a panic attack about some of the suggestions on your list for me. Not your fault," he adds as Steve's eyebrows try to strangle his nose to death. "But it makes me afraid." He sighs, and thunks his head against the chair seat closest to him. "All I wanted to do was remember and now all I wanna do is forget. Clean slate."

He waits patiently. Steve does start to talk with his mouth full, but Bucky purses his lips and glares and Steve rolls his eyes but shuts up until the big finale of his swallow. "Slate's just rock," Steve says slowly. "There's no such thing as a clean one. Even rocks the ocean's been beating up on for centuries. The water doesn't make 'em clean."

Bucky wrinkles his nose. "Gee, thanks Mr. Poet Laureate. What's it make 'em?"

Steve's turn to shrug. "Part of the world." 

This dark, sweet-smelling little world beneath the quilt's easy enough to be a part of. Easy enough to forget there's a larger one, with oceans and rocks and laser guns and bridge clubs, when Steve's pressed so close to him. When he's hot and sore and his tongue finds fruit in his mouth, slicker even than the backs of his teeth, and runs along it, soothing. But peaches do gotta come from somewhere. Clean as he might not be, there's no dirt in here to grow them, no rain for them besides the dried tears on his face.

"Maybe," he says, and tries burrowing his head into Steve's chest. Steve's hand comes down to slide between the floor and his smarting ass and squeeze. Bucky hisses. Yeah. This world's easy. Too bad that's not always enough.

**-**

Miss Louisiana 2000's orange eyes track his every move as he fills her water bowl from the Brita pitcher. Her tufted ears don't track his words quite so well, but that's all right; he's spent enough of his life talking to literal concrete walls that talking to a fuzzy little concrete wall with a funny pink triangle nose? The height of luxury.

"I figure, your ma goes to a lot of weddings, right? So why should she frown on you going? We just pack you up careful and fly you to a little Mediterranean island. Sure. You want that?"

He can hear her rumbling purr from across the room, even over the purr of the open fridge.

"You're my friend, right? Kinda gotta be, I guess. Since I feed you." He pauses his monologue to give a practical demonstration of this. "But still."

She blinks at him and he blinks back. "See? Friendship right there."

The mint looks in need of watering, but he locates the greenest leaf and plucks. Her funny pink triangle nose twitches as he holds it out for her to evaluate. "Meet with your approval?"

She doesn't hiss or anything, so that's probably a yes. His right hand scritches behind her ears, and the other places the mint in the center of her cat food in its gleaming, monogrammed bowl.

"Bon appetit, my gorgeous, perfect wedding guest. Now, where'd your ma hide the watering can?"

She's too busy scarfing down tuna pate to respond.

"Miss Louisianna 2000's coming to the wedding," Bucky explains when he's done groaning loud and long from the comfort of throwing his body into the armchair.

Licking brown sugar and baked apple from his thumb obscenely, Steve looks up from the pie he's polished half-off. No utensils in sight. And to make matters worse, he bites free a hunk of thumbnail and swallows it down with the pie filling. "We taking her in that spaceman carrier?" One of the massive fleshy pie-servers at the ends of his arms offers Bucky a ragged-edged slice. Bucky's judgmental and fussy, maybe, but he won't turn down good baked goods for nothing, so he grabs a paper tissue outta the box on the end table as a makeshift plate.

"Thanks. Of course. Only the finest travel accommodations for my girl." The end of his sentence is a little squished by all the pie churning in his mouth, but Steve's face is like he understands.

Like he understands a little _too _well, because when he gets done smiling indulgently with one side of his mouth, he clears his throat and says, "We can always elope if you want. Any time you want."

"You'd want Sam and Natasha there." Nothing's ever _told _him that or even hinted at that, exactly, but. It's a _what if _that likes to jump Boogie-mannish out of his brain's closet now and again.

"Buck, I don't care. I want what you want. I want to show you some medieval torture instruments."

"And then show me yours."

"And then show you mine." His voice is like if a feather mattress were a good thing. Even describing something other than Bucky, the word, "mine," from Steve's mouth, is gentle, firm pressure on a technicolor bruise. The bruise alone would be reassuring. Pressure's just the icing on the cake, the star on the pie crust. 

Which makes it easy to say, "You could care. If you wanted. I'd hang out with Sam even, if you wanted."

"Really?"

"Yeah. It's—Yeah." He shrugs. "We're just joking."

"Thought you were doing performance art. Or was it seriously expressing your feelings?"

"Yeah, like those things are mutually exclusive." He nudges Steve with a shoulder. "And, look, you do have friends who are just yours. I wouldn't be encroaching. And—" It takes a hefty grimace, but he manages, "Sam and I do...like each other."

"Oh?" Steve's eyebrows are a menace. "Do you _like _like each other?" he teases. 

"Oh shut _up_. I haven't really _like _liked anyone who wasn't you, since, what? Dorothy Hendrix, eighth grade." He's not sure if that's true, but it feels true in this moment. _Dorky Hendrix_, other kids called her, until Steve had something to say about it, and then people were kinda distracted by all the things they could call Steve. As if he gave a shit.  


"She did like pulling on your hair." 

"Yeah, she was real mean. I just, yeah, I don't need to have Sam and Tasha at the wedding if you don't want, but let's hang out."

"I'll make a new group chat. Will you start coming to DSA meetings with me too?"

"Ugh. You're always so _combative _after those meetings."

"Come on," he wheedles. "We can paint over your red star, turn it into a red rose."

"Fuck off." But he's giggling. He shoves at Steve's shoulder, where the rose would be on his own, and Steve shoves back, and before even the most seasoned slick-talking soccer announcer would have time to narrate the action, they've both abandoned their pies on the coffee table and Bucky's got Steve in a headlock and he's delivering a noogie to that grown-out golden mop, arm slack enough to invite the tables to turn. A real embossed, notarized invitation, and what kind of impolite tables wouldn't RSVP? No kind of tables in this house, and he laughs big and joyous, hands flailing, as Steve's fist finds his scalp and gets to work. 

-

Photoshop really is the most fun a guy can have without any weapons joining the party. It's important that he not fuss with the colors _too _much; after all, Steve saw them in person, close up. Even sunk his teeth into those reds and purples. But for the artistic license of the thing, Bucky does fuss with the brightness and contrast, seeking drama. Most dramatic ass selfie around. The peach, cut-&-pasted next to his bruised-up ass in all its phone-perched-on-the-bathroom-sink-with-the-timer-on glory, can take more working over, colors and lighting-wise. Less important there, the stickiness to realism, since it's less about a real peach than the _idea_ of a peach. The platonic ideal of a peach, the kind of peach an emoji oughta be: like a beat-up ass.

Then there's _borders_ to consider, and fonts. The question of a limited color palette drawing on the sunsetscape of rich hues strapped into his skin versus a cheery, bright peachy color, for contrast and jokes.

Bucky presses the heel of his fist between his eyes, dragging downward, smushing his nose flat against his philtrum. When his hand reaches his mouth, he takes a big, ineffective bite of the muscle, teeth scrabbling wetly against smooth skin. Fans out his fingers. Thumb and pinky press hard on his temples like trying to squeeze his face to Flatlander status, and he takes in a deep breath, soaking up what he can of the salted meat smell of his own palm. Headache like an ice pick. The whole army of icepicks it must've taken to excavate Steve.

Too much screen time. Too much screen time, specifically, sitting in the dark of his bedroom closet to keep his project perfectly private from Steve. Regardless of how Steve is out and won't be back for hours. Secrecy is paramount. He doesn't _think _he's historically underappreciated all the time and energy that goes into the romantic craft projects Steve makes for him, but it really takes a toll on a body, turns out. Really takes some thinking. He taps his head where the icepicks are tapping, then shuts the laptop lid.

Crawls out of the closet hands and knees, and decides to collapse for a while. Downing a whole bottle of aspirin and whole lake of water can wait for him to just rest there, trying to think only about sexy arts and crafts, and not about how much he wants no one else to die. 

A week passes. Work shit, brain shit, bathroom plumbing gone berserk. But in the end he settles on a bruise-colored gradient for the graphic's borders, and peachy and green tones for the armful of card stock he buys at Papersource. No headaches result from setting up a ring of flashlights in the dark closet and setting about constructing in there.

Steven the social butterfly is out drinking with some people from the theater. Said, "Don't wait up," with a kiss to Bucky's forehead and practically twirled out the door. As close as Steve gets to practically twirling when he's not in a fight or fucking Bucky up. So it's 11:00 PM and still no sight of his infuriating yellow head when Bucky tapes the cardstock mailbox to Steve's bedroom door—decorated all over with glittery stickers of fruits and vegetables, non-glittery stickers of interesting architecture, Peanuts comics torn from the papers, and a set of Frida Kahlo stamps he knows Steve admires.

"STEVEN G. ROGERS-BARNES," an embossed label reads at the center of the mess. And inside the box, Bucky sticks Steve's first piece of mail: a big laminated sheet of paper ordering, "Circle the Differences!!!" above a photo of his beat-to-hell ass beside an artfully photographed peach.

He goes to bed alone, and wakes up to Steve clambering onto the table, booze-breathed and warm, cuddling up behind him, and nuzzling at the spot behind his ear. "Go back to sleep," Steve says, before Bucky can even indicate that he's awake, and Buckyslurs an, "Mm, yeah, yessir, dummy," and folds himself into heavy quiet darkness like folding chocolate chips into pancake batter.

  


The first thing Steve says to him in the morning, straight into his ear, is, "No difference."

"Mm?"

"No differences. It's a rigged game. Like at the carnival."

"Ha." Uncoordinated with the last thick dregs of sleep, it takes a few tries for him to grab his end of the tin can telephone up off the floor. Once successful, he says into it, "Take it up with a lawyer" He puts an ear to its mouth, expectant, always surprised:

"You're my lawyer," Steve says in his other ear.

"No, come on, sweetheart. You're my lawyer. It's not a mutual lawyer society."

"Thought all relationships are."

"Mm. I guess you might be right. All right." He drops the canned telephone act with a clatter, and holds his hands wrists-up for handcuffs woven out of whatever consequences Steve wants. "Make me regret my scamming, law man."

"Mm. If you insist," Steve says, and rolls Bucky over onto his back. Rolls his way on top of Bucky. For a long time, Bucky thinks his punishment is just this, an endless kiss, the firmness of Steve's tongue exploring his mouth. The comforting weight of Steve pressing him into the table. More attempts at Flatland. But finally he pulls back, and his mouth is small and tight with joy, and he clears his throat. "Let's see. Making you regret it. Hmm. I know." Each word punctuated with a kiss to a different part of Bucky's face: "Someone's spending breakfast under the table."

"Oh no," Bucky says, "The horror. The horror," and gets shoved off the table and onto the floor for his troubles.

Most of his morning, in fact, is spent under the kitchen table. Eating bites of the chocolate chip pancakes he requested right from Steve's fingers until they're both grossly sticky with syrup. Sucking Steve's skin clean of that syrup. After a break to get dressed and brush his teeth, back under the table, reading a book with intermittent breaks to suck more on Steve's fingers while Steve reads his own book up above. Under-the-table activity number a million: Abandoning his book and listening as Steve abandons his book too and moves to reading their book club selection aloud. Million and one: Drinking small sips of water from a glass Steve holds to his lips.

And every now and then, Steve sighs and says something unbearably sweet like, "If only I could keep you hidden from view all the time," or, "You're lucky I'm so strict with you. You need it, huh?" In response to which Bucky will rub his face gratefully against the rough denim of Steve's knees.

Steve's fingers pop free of Bucky's mouth, and Steve's low voice reading, "'The ants, he explained, protect the plant from other insects in return for receiving free lodging**,'" **is joined in a duet by the scritch of pen on paper. The satisfying bread-slice sound of paper folding up, creases tightened by a thumbnail running over them the way Bucky's tongue runs over the backs of his teeth in search of any lingering syrup or Steve-taste. Sans any pause in the words, Steve's hand reappears, handing Bucky a little origami boat. Almost a shame to unfold the thing, elegantly made as it is, but secret messages are for reading, and the boat can be built back up later.

_Ready to come out? You've been good. Weather's nice._

Above, Steve reads, "'The sun was starting to sink, and in the forest, it was already twilight.'" Bucky's mouth twitches in a smile at the, "You've been good," _without _his goddamn permission, so thank god he's here, under the table. Getting paid under the table in origami and Steve's beloved handwriting.

_Yes_, he taps in Morse on Steve's knee with the bulb of his nose. Weather's nice. They could go anywhere, sailing in their teeny boat once it's been folded back to life.

Steve finishes his sentence and closes the book. Clears his throat. "Punishment over. What are you waiting for?" He pushes his chair back to get a good look at Bucky, and the sunlight his body previously blocked comes streaming under the table from the window with its pushed-aside floral curtains.

"I'm coming, I'm coming."

"Really? I didn't even touch you."

"You're the height of hilarity. Help me out?" Bucky bats his eyelashes like he's Minnie Mouse.

Steve reaches a hand down for him, and pushes his chair back further. "Come on, honeybrains." In a complicated ballet involving Bucky only banging his head on the table one time (and gently), they work together to get him out and standing. 

"See, there you go," Bucky says, wiping dust off the knees of his jeans as Steve stands too, putting a hand on Bucky's hip, proprietary even in the lightness of the hold. "Calling me sweet again. Knew it."

"What?" Steve looks genuinely offended. Maybe even mortally wounded. "I _mean _because honey is viscous. Sluggish. And the mere byproduct of another's work."

"Whose _work _created my brain? Mad Nazi scientists?"

Steve sighs, long and annoyed. "If you were less honeybrained, you would know the answer." He flicks Bucky's forehead. "The employees at the stupid factory, obviously."

"Oh, right," Bucky says, words jumpy with laughter. "How'd I forget them?"

"Your honeybrains hate laborers." His voice goes honey-sweet and bee-buzz-high, accompanied by a boop to Bucky's nose. "I think someone needs to have his nipples tortured while I read him Marxist theory."

"That's not the great educational tool that you seem convinced it is."

"Nonsense. You finally know your times tables."

"Sure, 'cause I'm the one who always struggled there."

"Sure. Come on." He kisses the tip of Bucky's ear. "We can scout out the cafe where we'll meet Sam next week, all right? And then farmer's market."

"Movie. Movie in between." Thumbing through listings in the paper can be their cafe activity.

"And a movie in between." He puts a hand on Bucky's waist, and pulls him in tight. "Really. Thank you."

"No mentioning it."

"You don't make the rules around here. And I _am _still waiting, you know."

"What for?"

"Bucky Barnes' thinkpiece on sexting emojis. The company intranet's looking awful bare."

  


So a week later, he dresses the intranet up. With a _thinkpiece_. What's next, a listicle of .gifs? But he must be doing something right, because that night, Steve says to him as they cuddle on the couch, "You really could be a writer, Buck. I'm serious. Not just copy for other people's books. Your words are good."

"Mm." It's too late at night for this, and he hides his face in Steve's chest, feeling himself go red. "My words say fuck off."

"And you can tell me to fuck off too if you like." The TV volume's down to three, but supersoldier and all, Bucky's ears still pick up canned laughter. The squeak of Lucille Ball having an idea. A warm hand strokes down the back of his skull. "But I'm right. I'm making a new list. One I hope won't cause any panic attacks."  


"Not your _fault if—"_  


"Did I say it was?" Steve asks coolly. "I'm allowed to hope. Anyway, I'm adding that. Writing workshops, arts and crafts clubs—"  
  


"I just. All I want is more people not to die around me."

"No one's died around you in a long time."

"Yeah. I suppose."  
  
"A long, long time."

"Hate when you're right. Makes me wanna punch you."

"You're always welcome to."

"Nah. But if you wanna take this conversation to bed, you're royally invited to punch me some."

"You're changing the subject."

"I am."

Tugging at Bucky's hair to pull his head into view, Steve presses a gentle kiss to the bridge of his nose. "You're allowed for now. Before I punch you, I got you something."

"Stop trying to win the fucking gift-giving contest."

"Nope. Let me up."

Bucky crawls off the couch and onto the floor, waiting patiently on his knees for whatever Steve got him. Unclear on whether this is a euphemistic sort of deal and he's about to get something in his mouth or whether it's more a _new boxed DVD set _or _new package of hair ties _sort of deal. Steve snaps his fingers and says, "Follow," and Bucky gets to crawling after him, right at his heels. Into the hall, and then the kitchen, pulling up short by the counter as Steve rustles in the cabinets.

"I've seen all the groceries," Bucky says, furrowing his brow.

"From the market, sure. From the bodega, no."

"You get me a six-pack?"

"You've got a six-pack. We've both got permanent six-packs."

"Just 'cause you're standing up don't mean you're a stand-up comic, sweetheart." Without looking, Steve kicks behind him, catching Bucky in the shoulder. Bucky smiles, a secret.

"Hush, you. Here." He swivels, and he gets down to Bucky's level. On one knee only, to be precise. In the palm of his outstretched hand, in garish foil wrapping, is a blue raspberry ring pop. "Never got you an engagement ring before. Big oversight, I think. Sorry that they didn't have peach."

"How dare they," Bucky murmurs, the words automatic while his brain goes offline, his eyes stuck on the diamond-shiny foil cupped in Steve's hand like a baby bird in a nest. "Can I—"

"Let me." Steve tears the packaging open, revealing the ring, a blue as shivery-swimmy as the ocean when its glossy planes catch the light. "Hold out your hand. Dealer's choice which."

Bucky hesitates, liking the thought of the non-stop _pressure detected _feedback he'd receive if he held out the left, but considering that's the hand he's likelier to hide in pockets or gloves or Steve's own, right it is.

The thing _is _designed for children, they're both forced to acknowledge, in the face of a tight squeeze onto his finger. But they make it work, and his circulation falls a couple hairs shy of cut-off, which is fine enough. Steve says, "Hmm," and Bucky holds up his hand like he's flashing a diamond at a dinner party full of jealous admirers.

"Like what you see?"

"The ring? Absolutely. The face behind it...Might wanna put a bag over that."

"Sweettalker." He gives the ring's top an experimental lick. Sweettaster, though with a hint of sour. Whether that's down to the raspberry or the blue, he's hard-pressed to say. He doesn't want to seem ungrateful, because that's the last thing he'd ever be with Steve, but the corner of his mouth tugs downward as he realizes, "It won't last."

"Make it last until we get to the island, huh?"

Moreso than Steve he's good at making food last, but that's not saying much of anything, so, "What'll you do to me if I don't?"

"I figure I can hold off on repercussions until we've got some medieval torture instruments at hand."

"And you'll buy me a new one."

"Yeah, Buck. Buy you as many ring pops as you like. Gotta stake my claim somehow."

"Uh, yeah, I promise it's pretty staked already."

"Just in case. Need everyone to know I've got this ass—" He gives an illustrative grope, causing Bucky to squeal and his knees to leave the floor a moment— "locked down securely."

"Yeah, chained to a stake in your backyard. I don't think my ass is going anywhere."

"Good. I'd hate to print MISSING posters."

"Post 'em on the intranet."

"Yeah, exactly. Hate to have to post them on the intranet. Just to remind myself. No one else's business, after all."

Later, it will be time to print out MISSING posters of his own ass to stick in Steve's mailbox as a taunt. It will be time to suck on his ring pop until his tongue's blue and it's down to a kernel of crystallized sugar and a plastic base. And time to start plotting what ring he can give Steve in return (those tiny seashells in his underwear drawer sure could use some arts and craftsing).

For now, he gives Steve his mouth, sinking down his ring finger, lips ending below the knuckle in a tight circle, sucking as hard as he knows how with his eyes meeting Steve's eyes, working with what he's got, hoping the gesture says everything he means.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Angst warning: One aspect of this story is Bucky dwelling on the friends he made in the war who died in combat. There's some briefly graphic descriptions of how a few people were killed, and it's established that some of the items on the list Steve gave him of ideas for getting out in the world gave him a panic attack because they reminded him of his dead friends. He asks Steve to make him cry, because he's been having trouble crying about it recently but feels like he needs to. This segues into a sex scene, which is followed by a conversation during which Bucky expresses that he feels like a bad luck charm/responsible for people dying around him, an idea that Steve vehemently disagrees with. Bucky isn't fully sold on that disagreement but works on coming around to it.
> 
> 2\. The book Steve and Bucky are reading together is _The Sixth Exctinction_ by Elizabeth Kolbert
> 
> 3\. My collection of songs that are clearly, obviously about this series can be found [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_xw1JDLN_A&list=PL81F-Vz8sjmtSwY_f5EndO2W2wRZOJ2fZ) :)


End file.
